Who's who

A widespread error in understanding the Alternative Right is a failure to distinguish between the different strands within the loose movement. Broadly speaking the movement can be split into two distinct branches: the alt-right and the alt-light.

While both reject left/liberal democratic hegemony and the rights, freedoms and/or affiliated movements associated with it, the alt-right and alt-light view these issues through fundamentally different lenses. The key dividing line is one of race versus culture, with the former being the core concern of the alt-right and the latter that of the alt-light.

The conflation between the two sides stems from the fact that whilst the term "alt-right" was first adopted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, it was bought to mainstream attention by Western chauvinists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, who used the label to reference a broader online, new, anti-establishment right wing.

However, since Spencer's extreme ideology entered the limelight both sides have attempted to disentangle themselves from the other; the alt-light distancing themselves from out-and-out racists, and the alt-right generally characterising the alt-light as intellectual lightweights and sell-outs.

The Alt-Light

The “alt-light” is a bloc of reactionary right-wing bloggers, vloggers, activists, alternative media journalists and social media personalities who, together with the more extreme alt-right, make up the broader Alternative Right.

The alt-light shares the alt-right’s far right, reactionary opposition to mainstream left-liberal cultural and political positions (including those accepted by the centre-right). The alt-light differs, however, in that it rejects the alt-right’s preferred extreme alternatives to these positions, such as support for racial nationalism, virulent antisemitism and an often explicitly fascist ideology.

The alt-light’s dual rejection of both the white nationalist alt-right and the mainstream left-liberal consensus means it lacks an easily articulated ideology. Given that it occupies a political space between the mainstream centre-right and the alt-right, however, the alt-light has the potential to normalise far right ideas and, for some, to act as a gateway to the alt-right’s extreme viewpoints.

Paul Joseph Watson

Paul Joseph Watson

Battersea, London, UK

From Sheffield, but based in Battersea, London, Watson produces cultural and political commentary videos on YouTube. Watson is also editor-at-large of the InfoWars and Prison Planet websites, headed by the American conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones.

Watson launched his YouTube channel in July 2011 and now has over 1,005,500 subscribers and has had over 221,698,300 views, with individual videos regularly being viewed over half a million times and some several million times.

These include topical claims, for example, that Hillary Clinton had various health complications during the 2016 US presidential campaign and that the Virginia Tech. mass shooting killer was a “mind-controlled assassin”, as well as ongoing, popular conspiracies, for example, that 9/11 was an inside job and that vaccinations cause autism.

The selective nature of his thinking also comes through in his criticisms of left-liberal positions on the aforementioned subjects, evident in Watson’s frequent reliance on clapped-out, buzzword generalisations like “Social Justice Warriors”, “Libtards” (Liberal Retards) and the “Regressive Left”. Watson ridicules these groups in sensationalist videos such as “Why Social Justice Warriors are SO DEMENTED” and (in an interview with Gavin McInnes, formerly of Rebel Media) “Why is the Left Promoting Pedophilia?”

Watson has rejected the alt-right's more extreme positions and has rejected the alt-right label, describing himself instead as “new right” (not to be confused with the European New Right). Watson has also emphasised his Western chauvinist, conservative, and right-wing libertarian political identity, and disavowed the alt-right’s embrace of racial identity politics.

Watson's involvement with the alt-light movement does not extend to more formal alliances and organisation outside his work with Alex Jones’ InfoWars site. Despite this, Watson has developed a large gathering on social media and interacts frequently with key US alt-light figures including Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern and Gavin McInnes. More recently Watson has been photographed posing with ex-Rebel Media reporter Caolan Robertson.

His large social media following has allowed him successfully to promote his alt-light ideas online. For example, In the wake of the Westminster terror attack, his was the most mentioned account on Twitter in the 48 hours following.

Publications:

Milo Yiannopoulos

Milo Yiannopoulos

US

Milo Yiannopoulos (born Milo Hanrahan) is a British media personality based in the US, best known as the (now former) Technology Editor of the alt-light American news outlet Breitbart News Network.

Born and raised in Kent, England, he attended the University of Manchester and Cambridge University but failed to complete and gain a degree from either. Yiannopoulos founded the online technology magazine The Kernel which he later sold to the Texas-based The Daily Dot for an undisclosed fee. Yiannopoulos joined Breitbart in the nominal position of Technology Editor in 2015.

Yiannopoulos has built his media career around being provocative, focusing especially on criticising left-liberal positions on gender, race and Islam. For example, he was a key promoter of the anti-feminist “Gamergate” movement, stated he would ban Glasgow University’s Muslim Student Association if he was elected its rector, and was permanently banned from Twitter after his role in encouraging the racist harassment of actor Leslie Jones.

Like Paul Joseph Watson, Yiannopoulos’ criticisms involve a deliberate strategy of offensive ridicule, selective evidence, and a loyal audience distrustful of the mainstream media that has bought into his distorted conception of left-liberal political positions.

Yiannopoulos has rejected the alt-right’s more extreme positions, emphasising instead his Western chauvinist, conservative, and right-wing libertarian political identity. Despite this, his spotlight-seeking provocative persona means his sincere positions are harder to identify and pin down.

In March 2015 Yiannopoulos co-authored with Allum Bokhari An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right, published on Breitbart.com. During the article the authors disavow the specifically nazi element of the alt-right, but go on to act as apologists for the alt-right’s racism, referring to it as a “mask” within a movement that is merely engaged in demonstrative hatred for fun or intellectual satisfaction.

The reason for this balancing act is Yiannopoulos' description of himself as a “cultural libertarian”, a term coined by Bokhari elsewhere on Breitbart.com to describe those who want to “liberate culture” from the “authoritarian left”.

Yiannopoulos is perhaps the most widely known alt-light figure, though his image took a bad knock in February 2017 when footage emerged of him appearing to endorse sexual relationships between “younger boys and older men”. In the wake of this scandal, he resigned from Breitbart, was uninvited from the influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and was dropped by the publisher Simon & Schuster who had originally paid an advance of $250,000.

However, in May 2017, he went on to launch his own organisation, MILO, Inc., with the help of $12 million in funding. Also, on 26 May, he announced he would self-publish his book Dangerous via his new publishing company Dangerous Books.

Yiannopoulos has maintained a large social media following – even after his departure from Breitbart – through his fondness for publicity stunts. This has included a “Cinco de MILO” party, attended by then Rebel Media White House correspondent Jack Posobiec, in which Yiannopoulos was wrapped in a snake and had “Feminism is Cancer” painted on the walls. He has also continued his speaking appearances, including alongside key anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller in May 2017.

Yiannopoulos' involvement with the alt-light movement has rarely extended to more formal alliances outside his previous work with Breitbart and occasional appearances alongside other alt-light figures during speeches and for interviews.

Gavin McInnes

Gavin McInnes

New York, US

Gavin McInnes is a British-Canadian writer, actor, “comedian” and media personality living in New York, who has become a key figure in the right-wing alternative media.

In 1994, he co-founded the Vice Media platform at which he was editor for 14 years. He then departed to present The Gavin McInnes Show on Compound Media and has become increasingly notorious for being a right-wing provocateur. Until August 2017 he was a columnist at the paleoconservative site Taki’s Magazine and commentator on the alt-light Rebel Media YouTube channel

McInnes also founded the fraternal, Western chauvinist organisation “Proud Boys” in 2016, who have a militant wing, “The Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights”, headed by Kyle Chapman aka “Based Stick Man”.

McInnes self-identifies as a member of the alt-light and has a conservative and right-wing libertarian political stance but rejects the alt-right’s racial nationalism. He has criticised an array of left-liberal positions and produced deliberately provocative content – often in the name of standing up for “free speech” – with videos such as “10 Things I hate About Jews” (later retitled “10 Things I Hate About Israel”) and articles such as “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural”.

McInnes’ criticisms often rely on a strategy of offensive ridicule, selective evidence and a loyal audience – distrustful of the mainstream media – that has bought into his conceptions of left-liberal political positions.

McInnes criticises the mainstream media and uses the alt-right and alt-light’s alternative media ecosystem to maintain a following. However, where the likes of Mike Cernovich have to rely on this separate media universe, McInnes’ background in the established, popular Vice Media platform and his sometime career as a comedian and actor, put him in a better position to mainstream alt-light viewpoints and attract those who may, in time, move on to the alt-right.

This is evident in McInnes’ mainstream media appearances. He had, prior to his increased engagement with Rebel Media, been a regular guest on various Fox News shows. This background also helps explain his choice of a trolling, satirical and “edgy” tone in his commentary. This feature of McInnes’ style – a leftover from his time at Vice and its trademark hipster, irony-heavy humour – comes through also in the bizarre, self-aware machismo of Proud Boys (whose initiations include being punched while shouting cereal brands).

Along with his association with Proud Boys (an organisation who counts failed BNP star Jack Buckby among its founding members), McInnes regularly defends the activities of others in the alt-light and in the mainstream right who are sympathetic to alt-light views.

At times, he has appeared as US figurehead for the alt-light, for example, when descending on Berkeley, California, to read a speech by mainstream far-right pundit Ann Coulter (who has endorsed Proud Boys), at a rally attended also by then-Rebel Media reporter Faith Goldy and ex-Rebel Media independent journalist Lauren Southern.

Mike Cernovich

Mike Cernovich

California, US

Mike Cernovich is a social media personality, writer and conspiracy theorist born in Illinois. Cernovich graduated from the University of Illinois and then the Pepperdine University School of Law and is now based in California.

He first gained attention through a website he created in 2012, dangerandplay.com, where he kept a blog promoting men’s rights, anti-feminism and misogynist pick-up artistry.

Since Richard Spencer’s notorious “Hailgate” National Policy Institute Conference in November 2016, Cernovich has disassociated himself from the term “alt-right” and has referred to himself as “new right” (not to be confused with the European New Right).

Cernovich made politics his primary concern during Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign, publishing MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again through Castalia House, a publishing house run by alt-right figure Theodore Beale aka Vox Day.

Alongside a pro-Trump campaign MAGA3X, and his involvement in organising the alt-light “DeploraBall” inauguration party, Cernovich also promoted anti-Hillary Clinton smears during the election including that she had various health complications and was involved in a paedophilia ring.

Cernovich now maintains his following through conspiracy theories about the manipulation of US politics by networks of “deep state” agents within the political establishment and via attacking the mainstream media.

In so doing, he plays to the distrust and contempt towards mainstream politics and media prevalent among his audience.

This emphasis means Cernovich relies less on offensive ridicule when criticising left-liberal beliefs and more on an attitude of complete self-assurance in the veracity of his conspiratorial and falsified alternative media journalism. Given Cernovich’s criticism of mainstream media he has claimed to deny many requests for interview.

However, he has appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes in an interview that highlighted the anti-mainstream sentiment Cernovich and others in the alt-light and alt-right alternative media bubble capitalise on.

As Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel noted, in defending the false claims regarding Hillary Clinton’s health to CBS host Steve Pelley, Cernovich relied upon reference to the “different universes” the mainstream media, and he and his followers, occupy when it comes to who can be trusted.

The result of this is that Cernovich’s ability to achieve a wider influence and normalise alt-light views for a wider audience is not undermined by avoiding the mainstream media but, rather, aided in doing so.

This strategy is evident too in his involvement with others in the alt-light movement who are equally focused on lambasting mainstream media and politics. This has included regular slots on Alex Jones’ InfoWars site to multiple YouTube discussions with the right-wing podcaster Stefan Molyneux.

In allying with others critical of mainstream institutions while avoiding a focus on race, Cernovich represents a potential for the alt-light to expand its fake news universe. As his following has grown, however, he has attracted some troubling, positive attention from the mainstream itself. Specifically, in May 2017, Cernovich was given a White House Press pass to attend a briefing, a clear example of the current Trump administration’s willingness to engage with the alt-light.

Stefan Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux

Canada

Stefan Molyneux is an Irish-Canadian social media personality, writer and public speaker now located in Canada. He was primarily raised in the UK before attending McGill University in 1991 and the University of Toronto in 1993 where he received an MA in History.

Along with his public speaking and self-published books, Molyneux is mainly known for his Freedomain Radio site that he set up 2005. The project has an associated forum, podcast, and YouTube channel.

Molyneux is important due to the strong sway he holds over his followers (thanks, in part, to his pseudo-intellectual style) and his closeness to the alt-right, making him a potential entry point for many into its more extreme positions.

Molyneux primarily commentates critically on left-liberal positions on race, feminism, gender (particularly regarding familial gender relations), immigration, and Islam. He interlaces these with criticisms of the mainstream media, conspiratorial theorising and self-assurance in his views while refraining from the abusive rhetoric prevalent elsewhere in the alt-light.

As noted, Molyneux takes a pseudo-academic stance, often presenting his videos with accompanying slides and dubbing Freedomain Radio “The Largest Philosophy Conversation in the World”.

Molyneux’s community of supporters is so strong that his online following has been described as being akin to a cult with tiered donation schemes, its advocacy of the family estrangement practice of “deFOO-ing” (“dissociation from family of origin”) and policing of its followers.

In 2012 Molyneux’s wife, a licensed psychologist, was found guilty by the College of Psychologists of Ontario of professional misconduct after using her husband’s podcast to promote the practice of deFOO-ing among her patients. (It is estimated thar 20 people have followed the “advice”.) Molyneux continues to cultivate his following online to the point that many of those who have left his community – or who have had loved ones estrange themselves – have created videos and sites such as fdrliberated.com to share their experiences. Though he has little formal association with other alt-light and alt-right figures and organisations, Molyneux has interacted sympathetically on social media and in YouTube interviews with figures from both. Furthermore, he has voiced support for the pseudoscientific racist theory of “Human Biodiversity”.

Given the centrality of race to alt-right ideology, this places him much closer to the alt-right than most in the alt-light. However, Molyneux’s background in the libertarian, anarchist and men’s rights movements means his ideological route into this core interest of the alt-right is motivated by a – albeit often still racist – concern with preserving Western culture rather than by white nationalism, as is essential in the alt-right.

Jack Buckby

Buckby is a British extremist activist and former editor of Proud Boys magazine. Buckby first gained attention as founder of the National Culturalists youth group before joining the British National Party (BNP) and being hotly tipped as a rising star within the party.

He quit the BNP to work as press officer for the marginal but extreme anti-Muslim party Liberty GB in 2014, attracting controversy for contesting the Batley and Spen by-election seat formerly held by murdered Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016.

He has since left Liberty GB and has been aiding the UKIP leadership bid of “counter-jihad” activist Anne Marie Waters.

Buckby worked as editor of the magazine of Proud Boys, the “Western chauvinist” fraternity run by McInnes but left after infighting. He has recently been associating with current Rebel Media reporter Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and ex-Rebel Media reporter Caolan Robertson. Buckby is also an associate of UK-based alt-right organiser Matt Tait.

Buckby has attempted to present himself as a spokesperson for the alt-right on several UK news programmes, including a controversial appearance on Channel 4 where he told black rights campaigner Barbara Ntumy: “I hope you don’t get raped” by a Syrian refugee.

Buckby distances himself from the “neo-Nazi and white supremacist” elements within the alt-right, considering himself to be a “paleoconservative and a culturist”. However, he has also claimed he wants a “majority-indigenous” Britain.

Kyle Chapman

Chapman is a social media personality, activist and public speaker who gained attention after fighting with anti-fascist protesters at a pro-Trump/free speech rally on 4 March 2017 in what became known as his “Based Stick Man” get-up: protective gear (including a gas mask), a shield and wooden stick.

Chapman was arrested prior to the rally for fighting a member of the public when promoting it. Chapman has since appeared at gatherings alongside members of the alt-light. This has included speaking at an April 2017 event hosted by “Make Cali Great Again” alongside Irma Hinojosa, Pettibone and Gionet.

Chapman, who has previously been convicted for crimes including illegal possession of a firearm, has also set up a militant wing of McInnes’ fraternal Western Chauvinist organisation Proud Boys, referred to as the “Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights” and has started a site – backtheright.com – for crowd funding right-wing political projects.

Jeff Giesea

Giesea is a co-founder of the now-defunct MAGA3X network and a primary organiser of the DeploraBall party to celebrate Trump’s Presidential inauguration, 19 January.

Giesea graduated from Stanford University in 1997, going on to work on a hedge fund under future Trump donor Peter Thiel and hewing out a career as a startup entrepreneur.

Giesea became familiar with alt-light troll Charles C Johnson online, inspiring him to author papers on “memetic warfare” for the official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence.

Writing there in 2015, he said: “warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies […] Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda”.

Alongside Cernovich, Giesea organised MAGA3X, building a network of online influencers including Posobiec and Gionet to make heavy use of right wing, pro-Trump catchphrases and images. Giesea describes himself as the “behind-the-scenes-business guy” of the outfit.

DeploraBall was to become a major dividing line between the alt-right and alt-light when co-organiser Gionet was removed from the guest list after making a series of antisemitic tweets and an online row with Cernovich.

The event featured speeches from James O’Keefe, Posobiec, McInnes, Wintrich, Hoft and Cernovich but barred such figures such as Richard Spencer alongside Nazi salutes and images of Pepe the Frog.

Irma Hinojosa

Irma Hinojosa is a US born, California-based social media personality, a writer for Borderland Alternative Media and a self-described “ground journalist” who covers “rallies and riots”.

Hinojosa first gained attention as a member of the “Latinos With Trump” grassroots pro-Trump movement.

Hinojosa regularly attends rallies with members of the alt-light and speaks at alt-light gatherings, including the “Make Cali Great Again” event in April 2017 alongside Pettibone, Kyle Chapman and others.

Hinojosa also attended a “MAGA3X” Trump fundraising event in Beverley Hills, Los Angeles in October 2016, which was attended by Posobiec and alt-right troll Gionet (MAGA3X was a pro-Trump grassroots organisation set up by Cernovich, Posobiec, Giesa and Gionet).

Jim Hoft

Hoft founded The Gateway Pundit (TGP) in 2004 and is a long-time presence in the right wing media sphere.

Under Hoft TGP has become notorious for spreading lies, for example reposting a staged hoax video titled “CAUGHT ON VIDEO =>Hillary Supporters Smash ‘Trump Car’ in Black Neighbourhood” and falsely claiming that CNN doctored a picture of the Fort Lauderdale shooter Esteban Santiago to make him look “more white”.

Hoft has also cited white supremacist sources such as Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), European Union Times, and DiversityIsCrap.com. Despite this, Hoft received the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism in May 2015.

Hoft used to write regularly for Breitbart News Network although, since 2012, he has focused on his own outlet. He is an acquaintance of Trump’s current senior advisor Steve Bannon.

Hoft gave a speech at the DeploraBall event, announcing that TGP had received White House press credentials.

Charles C. Johnson

Johnson has a well-established reputation for fabricated and inaccurate stories through his site Gotnews.com. For example, he has reported that Ferguson police-shooting victim Michael Brown was previously charged for murder. He has also targeted other journalists publishing the addresses of two New York Times reporters, and has been permanently banned from Twitter after asking for donations to help “take out” a Black Lives Matter activist.

While GotNews readership is small, POLITICO reported that, in February 2017, an aide gave Trump a printed copy of a GotNews article accusing Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh of leaking in the White House. A report from Forbes, in January 2017, also suggested Johnson was playing a role in Donald Trump’s transition committee by recommending potential nominees. Johnson founded WeSearchr in 2015 alongside Pax Dickinson.

The website functions as an information market where users post “bounties” to questions they want answered for other users to then research answers to in return for remuneration.

In practice, the site’s requests focus on raising money for campaigns and legal defence funds for far right groups and individuals, such as the nazi Daily Stormer website which is currently being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Dickinson left WeSearchr in May 2017, accusing Johnson of absconding with funds.

Alex Jones

Alex Jones is a Dallas born, Texas-residing US far-right radio host, writer, and documentarian known for promoting conspiracy theories, for example that the Columbine, Sandy Hook and Boston marathon killings were “false flag” events and that 9/11 was an “inside job” carried out by the government.

Jones, who has described himself as a paleoconservative and libertarian, first started espousing conspiracy theories as a radio host in the mid-1990s and so precedes the alt-right and its nascent sphere of alternative, conspiratorial media.

However, along with creating a space for anti-mainstream media sentiment through cultivating paranoia, Jones’ site InfoWars.com has hosted alt-light figures including Cernovich and Southern.

Furthermore, the editor-at-large of Jones’ prisonplanet.com site is the British conspiracy theorist, fake news purveyor and leading alt-light figure Paul Watson.

InfoWars has received press attention for its links to Donald Trump and his campaign. For example, InfoWars popularised the “Hillary for Prison” catchphrase in 2015, subsequently adopted by Trump, and many other Trump campaign points have been traced back to InfoWars by Media Matters. Trump appeared on The Alex Jones Show in December 2015, telling him: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down” and Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian far rightist, publicly praised him.

Luke Nash-Jones

Nash-Jones (aka Prince Luke of Kekistan) is a British alt-light figure who founded the oddball People’s Charter Foundation and runs the YouTube channel Make Britain Great Again.

The People’s Charter, formed in 2016, self-describes as “a non-partisan British Identitarian campaign group run by a diverse group of passionate Tory, UKIP, and other patriots”. The group campaigns for what it calls a “proper Brexit” and for the banning of Sharia Law in the UK.

Make Britain Great Again, or MBGA News, is a YouTube channel primarily concerned with Islam and Muslims, although it also discusses themes common in the Alternative Right, such as the actions of antifascists and the mind-numbingly unfunny “Kekistan” meme.

Nash-Jones is also the driving force behind the website kekrepublic.com which is a fictional country invented by users of 4chan’s /pol/ board. The website takes the “joke” further than most and allows people to enlist as a Knight of Kekistan with a full list of mock-chivalric ranks.

Brittany Pettibone

Pettibone is a California-based author, social media personality and vlogger. Alongside British-born commentator Tara McCarthy, until recently Pettibone co-hosted the Virtue of the West vlog which is dedicated to “the traditional values that once made Western Civilization great, including but not limited to […] traditional gender roles and love of one’s own culture, race and country”.

Pettibone has interviewed figures from across the alt-light (including Southern, Cernovich, and Posobiec), the alt-right (including Theodore Beale aka Vox Day and Red Ice Creation’s Lana Lokteff) and many others in the far right (including Yaxley-Lennon). Pettibone is currently presenting a joint vlog with Southern whilst McCarthy completes her book, “Irreplaceable: How and Why We Must Save the West”.

While Pettibone has not embraced the term “alt-right”, her interviews have been shared via the Altright.com site and she has in turn been interviewed on Radio 3Fourteen, an affiliated show on Red Ice TV. Pettibone has appeared at various alt-light rallies in the US, and online has perpetuated the debunked #Pizzagate and “white genocide” conspiracy theories.

In July 2017, Pettibone accompanied alt-light commentator Lauren Southern to report on the efforts of Defend Europe, a stunt by members of the far-right European Identitarian movement to hinder the efforts of NGO refugee search and rescue ships in the Mediterranean.

Jack Posobiec

Posobiec is a Philadelphia-born, Washington DC-residing, internet activist. Previously, he worked as special projects director at the grassroots “Citizens for Trump” organisation and, as part of the MAGA3X network, co-organised the DeploraBall inauguration party alongside Cernovich, Giesea and the disinvited Gionet.

Posobiec also had a two-months run as White House correspondent for alt-light platform Rebel Media in 2017.

While a pro-Trump organiser, Posobiec developed a reputation for promoting fake news, including the “Pizzagate” lie that Hilary Clinton was involved in a paedophile ring. He told The New Yorker that his journalistic style is to “make something happen, and then cover what happens”, suggested, for example, by his possible involvement in discrediting an anti-Trump protest by having someone arrive with a “Rape Melania” sign.

Posobiec has also been shown by various independent data analysts to have played a key (and deliberate) role in promoting the #MacronLeaks misinformation campaign prior to the final round of the 2017 French Presidential Election.

He also organised the June 2017 Rally Against Political Violence in Washington DC, the alt-light alternative to the Free Speech Rally on the same day at which Richard Spencer was speaking.

In June 2017, Posobiec was among protesters disrupting the New York Public Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar which depicted Ceaser as President Trump.

In August 2017 Posobiec gained media attention after he was retweeted by President Trump.

Lauren Southern

Southern is a Canadian activist and one of the alt-light’s most well known commentators.

Southern joined Rebel Media in April 2015, with her show “Stand Off with Lauren Southern” becoming one of the most popular shows on the outlet, helping her gain a sizable social media and YouTube following.

Southern left in March 2017 to work independently, shortly after gaining access to the White House Press Briefing.

Southern is known for her provocative anti-feminist stunts and anti-migrant rhetoric. She was briefly suspended as a candidate from the Libertarian Party in 2015 after she arrived at a Slutwalk protest with a sign reading “there is no rape culture in the West”.

In March 2016 Southern initiated “The Triggering”, the day after International Women’s Day, described by Southern as the mass social media posting of “offensive content in defence of free speech”. In October 2016, Southern had her gender legally changed to male in order to criticise Canadian gender ID policy.

In May 2017, she joined members of the far-right Identitarian movement’s Defend Europe stunt and attempted to block the path of NGO search-and-rescue (SAR) ships bringing refugees to Italy.

In July 2017, she travelled to Italy to report on Defend Europe’s second mission to hinder NGO SAR ships. As a result of her involvement, the web platform Patreon suspended Southern’s account.

Southern has distanced herself from the alt-right, claiming: “While I certainly have crossover with the alt-right on a decent amount of subjects, I don’t focus on white identity as one of my main topics”.

Southern is a good friend of alt-light vlogger Brittany Pettibone and has co-produced videos with her.

Top links:

Blaire White

White is a social media personality who primarily vlogs about transgenderism, sexuality and feminism from a perspective deeply critical of left-liberal positions.

White, who is a transgender woman, believes transgender issues have been monopolised by “SJWs” [Social Justice Warriors] and is of the opinion that “transgenderism is a mental disorder”.

White’s statements are typically inflammatory, her video titles including “Racism against Whites – Black Lives Matter”, “Feminist Think All Men are Rapists” and the three part series “Triggering Trannies”. Such content has ensured White’s videos routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views.

White has been interviewed (separately) by Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson on InfoWars.com, and has appeared in Milo Yiannopolous’ livestream in support of his Privilege Grant.

White has not formally allied herself with the Alternative Right. However, her views have secured a following within the alt-light.

Lucian Wintrich

Wintrich is a Pittsburgh-born, New York-based White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing political blog known for its frequent fake news and inaccuracies. He had scant journalistic experience prior to this role (his alternative media site “Rabble Media”, started in summer of 2016, is now dormant).

Wintrich came to press attention first through his “Twinks4Trump” photography exhibition in New York, featuring contributions from McInnes, then of Rebel Media, ex-Breitbart tech editor Yiannopoulos and others. Wintrich’s own photos from the exhibition were displayed at the “Wake Up!” LGBT pro-Trump party at the 2016 Republican National Convention where both Yiannopoulos and prominent anti-Islam fanatic Pamela Geller spoke.

Wintrich spoke at the DeploraBall inauguration party in January 2017.

Organisations

Breitbart News Network

Launched by Andrew Breitbart in 2007, Breitbart News Network has, under former executive chair Steve Bannon, become the premier outlet of alt-light politics. Breitbart currently has offices in London, Texas, California and Jerusalem.

From the outset, Breitbart.com was notable for its aggressive attacks on both the Obama administration and on mainstream Republican politicians. In 2009, Breitbart received attention upon releasing James O’Keefe’s undercover investigation into the community empowerment organisation ACORN which caused the latter to fold.

Bannon took the reins on Breitbart’s demise in 2012 and, with $10 million from hedge-fund billionaire and key Trump funder Robert Mercer (who invested the money in 2011), radically increased the confrontational tone and attacks on immigrants and Islam.

A commonplace tactic is to decontextualize information and quotations in screaming headlines that present wildly inflated claims, often followed by a climb-down in the body of the actual piece.

Breitbart began pumping out pro-Trump propaganda from the start of his campaign and Trump hired Bannon as his campaign CEO in August 2016. Their union hugely boosted Breitbart’s profile, the outlet receiving 45 million unique visitors in the month preceding the US election. Following his victory, Bannon was subsequently hired as Trump’s “senior advisor”. While avoiding direct endorsements of white nationalism, Breitbart has been key to extending the reach of the hard alt-right.

Former figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos adopted the term “alt-right” in 2016 to refer to an online anti-establishment right and whitewashed outwardly racist activities like “trolling”.

In July 2016 Steve Bannon told Mother Jones that Breitbart was “the platform for the alt-right”. The NPI’s Richard Spencer told the Daily Beast in August 2016 that Breitbart acted as a “gateway to alt-right ideas and writers”. Since Trump’s election and sustained press scrutiny, however, Breitbart, Yiannopoulos and the white nationalist alt-right have largely disavowed one another.

Breitbart London was founded in February 2014. The outlet has multiple links to the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Many hardline figures have had columns on the outlet, including former leader Nigel Farage and editor Raheem Kassam temporarily served as adviser to then-UKIP leader Farage in 2014. Several staff writers also have links to the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), a London-based far right organisation that has hosted a variety of white nationalist and alt-right speakers.

In 2016, Breitbart announced plans to launch offices in France and Germany although these plans have stalled due to lack of funds. Upon leaving the White House in August 2017, Bannon has returned to helm Breitbart.

Key individuals:

Steve Bannon

Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights

The Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK) was founded in April 2017 by Kyle Chapman (aka Based Stick Man). FOAK shortly after joined with McInnes’ Western chauvinist fraternity Proud Boys, of which it serves as the “tactical defence arm”.

Chapman stated that the emphasis of FOAK “will be on street activism, preparation, defence and confrontation. We will protect and defend our right wing brethren when the police and government fail to do so”.

The group has social media accounts for several regional branches across the USA.

Aside from Chapman, other prominent members include Austin Gillespie (aka Augustus Invictus). According to the Anti-Defamation League, Gillespie is also a Sergeant-at-Arms for the Florida American Guard, a white supremacist group.

Key individuals:

Kyle Chapman

Gab.ai

Current CEO Andrew Torba founded Gab.ai in August 2016 as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter.

The crowdfunded platform, which allows users to post 300-word “gabs”, does not explicitly prohibit hate speech, with the only restrictions of the platform being threats of violence, promotion of terrorism, illegal pornography and doxing (exposing someone's identity).

Torba has denied that Gab is aimed specifically at the alt-right, claiming that its frog logo is based on Biblical symbolism rather than a reference to Pepe the Frog. However, the platform has provided a home for popular alt-right and alt-light Twitter accounts that have been suspended from Twitter such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Ricky Vaughn, Pax Dickinson and Richard Spencer.

The site has functioned as an echo chamber and fostered conspiracies from “Pizzagate” to white genocide. Racism, antisemitism and misogyny is liberally thrown around on the site although, according to the New York Times, a minor censorship debate was sparked when alt-right hacker Andrew Auernheimer (aka weev) had his bio, which advocated rape, torture and murdering Jews, deleted.

In May 2017 the Gab management claimed the site had attracted 170,000 users who have made 7.6 million posts.

Key individuals:

Andre Torba

The Gateway Pundit

The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is a far right news website founded by Jim Hoft in 2004. The site has been described as “one of the worst purveyors of false information on the internet” by media watchdog Media Matters.

TGP is known for spreading untruths, for example reposting a staged hoax video under the title “CAUGHT ON VIDEO =>Hillary Supporters Smash ‘Trump Car’ in Black Neighbourhood” and falsely claiming that CNN doctored a picture of the Fort Lauderdale shooter Esteban Santiago to make him look “more white”. The pro-Trump site was also a vehicle for rumours about Hillary Clinton’s poor health during her presidential campaign.

TGP has favourably quoted white supremacist sources such as Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), European Union Times, and DiversityIsCrap.com. Despite this, content from the site has often been picked up by more mainstream outlets such as the Drudge Report and distributed widely through social media. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have also quoted TGP.

Hoft is an acquaintance of former senior advisor to Trump, Steve Bannon. He has claimed that, upon becoming seriously ill in 2013, Bannon, then executive chair of Breitbart News Network, volunteered to keep TGP going until he was well enough to write again.

According to the New Yorker, TGP received more than a million unique visitors a day in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election. The site claims to receive an average of 15 million visits per month. In February 2017, TGP reporter Lucian Wintrich was granted White House press credentials.

Key individuals:

Jim Hoft

Lucian Wintrich

Gotnews.com

Gotnews is a “news” website founded by alt-light troll Charles C Johnson. The website says it “seeks to transform journalism by empowering everyday people, experts, and sources to break news and get rewarded for their effort”. The site aims to pay members income based on web traffic generated by their stories.

The site encourages prospective writers to “make chaos” and “violate taboos but don’t break laws”. Alongside Johnson, alt-right troll Gionet and Peter Duke, former creative director of MAGA3X, have also written for the site.

While Gotnews has a small readership, the political news site POLITICO reported that, in February 2017, an aide gave President Trump a printed copy of a GotNews article accusing Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh of being “the source behind a bunch of leaks” in the White House. Johnson also told POLITICO: “I can tell you unequivocally that the story was shared all around the White House”.

Key individuals:

Charles C. Johnson

InfoWars/Prison Planet

InfoWars is the primary website of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, launched in 1999, with sister site Prison Planet launched in 2001. Paul Joseph Watson, who has been working with Jones since 2002, is the editor-at-large of both websites.

InfoWars hosts The Alex Jones Show, the primary vehicle of Jones who has been called “the most influential right-wing conspiracy theorist in the United States today” by the Anti-Defamation League.

Both sites also contain “news” and commentary articles, many of them from Paul Watson. Much of the content of InfoWars/Prison Planet consists of conspiracy theories around alleged “false flag” operations carried out by the New World Order – a shadowy cabal of “globalist” elites – pro-Trump propaganda and attacks on liberal institutions.

InfoWars has received press attention for its links to Trump and his campaign. For example, it popularised the “Hillary for Prison” slogan in 2015, subsequently adopted by Trump and other Trump campaign points have been traced back to InfoWars by Media Matters.

In 2016, Trump backed up his claims that Mexico was sending killers and rapists into the USA with an InfoWars video and Donald Trump Jr redistributed an InfoWars article accusing Clinton of wearing an earpiece in the first presidential debate.

Trump appeared on The Alex Jones Show in December 2015, telling Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down”. Jones has claimed he “personally talked to” Trump to give him advice during his campaign and that Trump called him to “thank” his audience after the election. Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian far right philosopher with links to the Kremlin, also told Jones that he was a “hero” for “exposing the war crimes of Hillary Clinton”.

According to the web analyst Alexa, the site receives 5,438,400 unique visitors a month.

Key individuals:

Alex Jones

Paul Joseph Watson

MAGA3X (Now Defunct)

MAGA3X is the now-defunct network built by Mike Cernovich and Jeff Giesea. MAGA3X has described itself as “a citizen grassroots movement that helped elect Trump”. Peter Duke worked as the creative director of the group.

During the election campaign MAGA3X built a network of social media influencers, including Posobiec and Gionet and made heavy use of images to antagonise liberals and support Trump. MAGA3X also made use of pro-Trump flash mobs, many of which were organised by Gionet.

MAGA3X sponsored the DeploraBall party on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, on 19 January, at the National Press Club in Washington DC. The event was vital in exacerbating divisions between the alt-light and alt-right. James O’Keefe, Posobiec, McInnes, Lucian Wintrich, Jim Hoft and Cernovich gave speeches at the event.

However, Richard Spencer was barred from attending as was Gionet after a series of antisemitic tweets and a public tiff with Cernovich. The event also banned Nazi salutes and images of Pepe the Frog.

The event triggered violent protests outside the venue.

Key individuals:

Mike Cernovich

Jeff Giesea

Jack Posobiec

MILO, Inc

MILO, Inc. is the “talent factory and management company” of Milo Yiannopoulos, aimed at “the destruction of political correctness and the progressive left”. The current CEO of the outfit is media executive Alexander Macris.

The venture was announced in May 2017, following Yiannopoulos’ hiatus from the limelight after he was forced to resign from Breitbart News Network due to comments appearing to defend pederasty. MILO, Inc. will manage Yiannopoulos' media career and scout for rising online media figures who “hate feminism, who hate political correctness”. The company will also be organising Yiannopoulos’ “Free Speech Week” at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in the autumn.

Yiannopoulos announced he had received $12million allowing him to hire “a seasoned media executive” for the company’s “30-person team based in Miami, Florida”. BuzzFeed reported in July 2017 that leaked emails strongly suggest Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund backer of Breitbart and Donald Trump, and his daughter Rebekah, an associate of Stephen Bannon, are bankrolling this new venture.

Key individuals:

Milo Yiannopoulos

Proud Boys

Founded by former VICE editor and Rebel Media commentator Gavin McInnes in 2016, Proud Boys is a “Western chauvinist”, libertarian fraternity with an international membership.

Proud Boys apes the “bro” culture of American college fraternities but holds typically conservative doctrines such as “venerate the housewife”, “venerate the entrepreneur”, and abstention from masturbation. Gay and non-white members are permitted to join as long as they “recognise that white men are not the problem”.

Named after a song in the Aladdin musical, Proud Boys’ machismo appears to have a level of irony and self-awareness, a result of McInnes’ influence. Initiations to the group include, bizarrely, being punched while shouting the names of cereal brands. The group’s uniform is matching Fred Perry tops.

Members of Proud Boys have played an active role in violent confrontations with anti-fascists and, according to McInnes, members can ascend to the “fourth degree” when they “kick the crap out of an antifa”. In 2017, Kyle Chapman (aka Based Stick Man) founded “The Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights” (FOAK), as an affiliated militant chapter of the group. Members of FOAK include Austin Gillespie (aka Augustus Invictus), a member of the white supremacist Florida American Guard.

In July 2017, the group received adverse press attention when five Proud Boys disrupted an indigenous protest ceremony on Canada Day in Halifax. The members, who were also members of the Canadian military, were temporarily taken off duty pending an investigation by the Canadian military police, although no charges were ultimately laid against the members.

Proud Boys has a webzine that posts news-related articles around immigration and the actions of anti-fascists. Notable members and affiliates include Colton Merwin, organiser of the alt-right June 2017 Free Speech Rally in DC, and Kyle Prescott, a prominent recruiter on social media for the group. Former British National Party (BNP) member Jack Buckby was editor of the Proud Boys magazine but left the group following infighting.

Key individuals:

Gavin McInnes

Kyle Chapman

Rebel Media

Rebel Media is a Canadian media organisation founded by “counter-jihad” activist Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley in February 2015, and has boasted several of the alt-light’s most recognisable figures as contributors.

Inspired by the Breitbart News Network, Levant founded Rebel Media after the right-wing Canadian TV channel Sun News Network (SNN), at which he was a pundit, was pulled off air due to frequent complaints and poor ratings. Several former SNN personalities, such as Faith Goldy, have since joined Rebel.

Free from the cost and constraint of TV licensing, Rebel Media has quickly grown, capitalising on the ascendency of Donald Trump. Following the American Presidential elections Rebel claimed to have received 19 million views in a 30-day period, and now employs around 45 people.

Contributors have included Gavin McInnes and Faith Goldy. Jack Posobiec had a two-month stint at the outlet in 2017 and Lauren Southern’s show was among the most popular on the network until she left in March 2017. Rebel has a UK team that has employed reporter Caolan Robertson and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), founder and former leader of the anti-Muslim street gang, the English Defence League (EDL). Lennon and Robertson have received attention for a number of incendiary videos capitalising on recent terror attacks in the UK.

Rebel content occasionally nods to the hard alt-right. In May 2017 Faith Goldy uploaded a video on demographic changes in Canada titled “White Genocide in Canada?” and a Gavin McInnes video entitled “10 things I hate about Jews”, later retitled “10 things I hate about Israel”.

The outlet has been boycotted by a number of advertisers following a 2017 campaign by social media activist group Sleeping Giants. In August 2017 Rebel suffered internal splits and cofounder Brian Lilley, McInnes, Goldy, and Robertson all left the organisation.

Key individuals:

Ezra Levant

The Alt-Right

The alt-right is an international, extreme far-right movement comprised of groups and individuals, organized primarily online though with offline outlets, whose core belief is that "white identity" is under attack from pro-multicultural and liberal elites and so-called "social justice warriors" (SJW) who use "political correctness" to undermine the rights of white males.

Unlike the alt-light, who are concerned with Western culture, the alt-right has racism at its core and many of its adherents envisage a world comprised of racially pure ethno-states. Antisemitism, homophobia and extreme misogyny are core elements of alt-right ideology. They reject what leading alt-right figure Jared Taylor has called the “dangerous myth” of equality which in practice means an opposition to, amongst other groups, the rights of women, LGBT+ and ethnic minorities.

Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer

USA

Richard Spencer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Dallas, Texas, is responsible for popularising the term “alt-right” and is the movement’s best-known activist.

Spencer was educated at the University of Virginia, obtained a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and then embarked on doctoral studies at the private Duke University.

Tellingly, Spencer’s entrance essay for Duke University was on the German philosopher, political theorist and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt. In 2007, he dropped out and took a job as assistant editor at Pat Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative, before later being fired for his extremist views.

Spencer then moved to Taki’s Magazine as executive editor before founding AlternativeRight.com in 2010 as “an online magazine of radical traditionalism” that aimed “to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the ‘conservative’ establishment.” The website’s contributing editors were Peter Brimelow, the British founder of the anti-immigrant website VDARE.com, and Paul Gottfried, also from Taki’s Magazine. The success of the website meant that in 2011 Spencer was offered the leading position at the National Policy Institute (NPI) and Washington Summit Publishers upon the death of Louis Andrews. On taking control he promptly moved the operation from Washington DC to the location of his family holiday home in Whitefish, Montana.

In 2012, Spencer launched Radix Journal as a twice-yearly offshoot of Washington Summit Publishers. The journal went on to be one of the leading outlets for the alt-right, hosting articles by a plethora of prominent far-right writers, before Spencer stood down in January 2017 to launch his new venture, Altright.com.

Spencer and the NPI have been central to the rise of the alt-right and have played an important role in bringing European New Right thinkers to an American far-right audience. The yearly conferences, organised by Spencer, who describes himself as an “identitarian”, attract prominent speakers from across America and Europe. In 2013, at their “After The Fall: The Future of Identity” conference, the NPI hosted the French New Right founder and philosopher Alain de Benoist alongside the fascist author of Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, Tomislav Sunić.

That same year, at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance conference, Spencer called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”.

In 2014, Spencer was expelled from Hungary after trying to organise a conference in Budapest that was to include Philippe Vardon from the French Bloc Identitaire movement and the Russian far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin. As a result, Spencer is now banned from entering the UK and the other European Union countries covered by the Schengen agreement.

The NPI made headlines around the world in late 2016 when Spencer was filmed bellowing “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” at their “Become Who You Are” conference in Washington DC where speakers included VDare’s Peter Brimelow, antisemite Kevin MacDonald and Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes) from the UK.

Spencer was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump during his election campaign and became an increasingly high profile figure especially in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s speech that referred to the alt-right.

In January 2017, Spencer was central to the emergence of AltRight Corporation, a merger between the NPI, the publisher Arktos Media and the Scandinavian media platform Red Ice Creations.

The new group has a single board and an office in city centre Washington DC. Spencer is the American editor and sits on the Board of Directors with Daniel Friberg, Henrik Palmgren, William Regnery and Tor Westman.

Daniel Friberg

Daniel Friberg

He holds an MBA from Gothenburg Business School and was CEO of Wiking Mineral, a small mining company headquartered in Uppsala, that explored for base and precious metal deposits in Sweden. His links with the company ended in March 2016. Friberg has a long history of political extremism and after a number of criminal convictions – including for weapons offences – he became involved with the nazi National Alliance as well as Swedish Resistance.

As he grew older, Friberg distanced himself from the more openly nazi scene and eventually adopted a more “metapolitical” approach which, as he himself describes, is “about affecting and shaping people’s thoughts, worldviews, and the very concepts which they use to make sense of and define the world around them”.

To this end, he was involved in setting up the far right Scandinavian message board Nordisk.ru, a web resource infamously used by mass killer Anders Breivik. He was also a founding member of the influential Swedish “metapolitical” think tank Motpol.

However, it is as CEO and co-founder of publishing house Arktos Media that Friberg has become best known. Formed in late 2009, Arktos has gone on to be the most important purveyor of European New Right and alt-right material, publishing works by the likes of de Benoist and Dugin.

Friberg himself has published The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition through Arktos and has had it translated into twelve languages. It opens by stating defiantly: “After more than half a century of retreat, marginalisation, and constant concessions to an ever-more aggressive and demanding Left, the true European Right is returning with a vengeance.”

He is the organiser of a series of important alt-right conferences known as “Identitarian Ideas”, the most recent of which took place in Stockholm in February 2017.

In January 2017, Friberg became a co-founder of AltRight Corporation, a merger between Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, Arktos Media and alt-right Scandinavian media platform Red Ice Creations. The new group has a single board and an office in central Washington DC.

Friberg is the European editor and sits on the Board of Directors alongside Richard Spencer, Henrik Palmgren, William Regnery and Tor Westman.

Andrew Anglin

Andrew Anglin

Andrew Anglin is an infamous American nazi who has adopted the iconography of the alt-right and is most widely known for seeking to weaponise the internet. He is the founder of the influential Daily Stormer website, named after the viscerally antisemitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer produced by Julius Streicher.

From Worthington, Ohio, Anglin is reported to have been a liberal while young though, in a post on his website Daily Stormer in March 2015, he said, “I was not really ever a liberal, in the SJW [Social Justice Warrior] sense, as they are fighting for the system which is something I never did.” In January 2006, he was arrested and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia.

According to an extensive profile in Columbus Alive, a local newspaper near where Anglin grew up, in 2008, he moved to the Philippines, aged 23, to teach English. While he later wrote that Filipinos are “a civilized, non-aggressive and industrious people”, he also claimed to have become increasingly depressed and concluded that “It was only among my own kind — those of the European race — that I would ever be able to share true kinship, as it is only they who share my blood, and can understand my soul. ... By the Grace of God, I found Adolf Hitler.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), the website 4Chan was central to Anglin’s move towards fascism. In Anglin’s own words: “I had always been into 4chan, as I am at heart a troll, […] This is about the time /new/ [a page on 4chan] was going full-Nazi, and so I got into Hitler, and realized that through this type of nationalist system, alienation could be replaced with community in a real sense, while the authoritarianism would allow for technology to develop in a direction that was beneficial rather than destructive to the people.”

Prior to the launch of the Daily Stormer, Anglin launched a number of smaller and less successful sites. One, adventurequest2012, was a peculiar conspiracy site hosting discussions about reptilian shape-shifters and humanoid sharks. Then, in 2012, he set up the short-lived Total Fascism site where he wrote articles about topics such as Hitler’s art and the Greek nazi party Golden Dawn.

According to Vocativ, “Anglin finally concluded that his essays on the site, which were often long, limited his audience” and thus decided to launch the Daily Stormer on 4 July 2013.

Since being launched the Daily Stormer has risen to become one of the most important nazi websites in the world. According to traffic statistics website Alexa, Daily Stormer’s global ranking at one point reached an impressive 13,890th in the world and 4,556th in the United States. This is especially shocking considering the extreme racism, antisemitism and Holocaust denial and homophobia published on the website, much of it by Anglin himself. Anglin is a rampant misogynist, so much so that his attacks on white women have even angered some within the white supremacist scene.

Through the Daily Stormer, Anglin has been able to mobilise a “Stormer Troll Army” to carry out orchestrated harassment campaigns on Anglin’s opponents upon request. In April 2017, the SPLC filed a federal suit against Anglin after his “Stormers” carried out a torrent of antisemitic abuse and threats directed at a Jewish woman.

Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson is a highly influential yet elusive character behind the leading American alt-right organisation, Counter-Currents Publishing. Remarkably for someone active in the online world, Johnson has managed to remain anonymous for decades with no picture of him ever surfacing until a HOPE not hate investigation captured footage of him in London attending a meeting of the far-right London Forum.

Johnson’s Counter-Currents Publishing is a key source of alt-right ideas and has experienced a period of growth recently, with March 2017 being its best month ever in terms of unique visitors (187,296).

The website’s fortunes have been tied to the rise of the alt-right and, after America, Great Britain provides the most site traffic. Out of the top ten cities visiting the site, five are based in Europe with Berlin, London and Stockholm coming in second, third and fourth respectively.

Johnson has also set up the New York Forum and a North West Forum, the inaugural meeting of which was held in Seattle in November 2016. These groups are modelled on the UK based London Forum at which he has spoken numerous times.

However, it is not all good news for Johnson and Counter-Currents Publishing. Following a campaign by the SPLC and The Washington Post, Amazon.com removed Counter Currents from its Affiliate Marketing programme, costing the website an estimated $6,000 a year.

Johnson has also had an explosive falling out with Daniel Friberg and reportedly issued an ultimatum at the launch of the Scandza Forum in Sweden, stating that he would not speak if Friberg attended.

Speaking on an online forum afterwards, Johnson wrote colourfully: “Daniel Friberg is a piece of shit who should be flushed from this movement forever” and called him “a lying piece of shit”. Johnson also runs the Savitri Devi Archive, an online collection of material relating to the antisemitic Hitlerworshipping, adoptive Hindu Nazi, real name Maximiani Portas.

To run the site Johnson uses the alias Dr. RG Fowler that he also uses to write about Devi on his own Counter-Currents website.

Top Links:

Editor-in-chief of Counter Currents

Organiser of New York Forum and North West Forum

Runs the Savitri Devi Archive

Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor is a white nationalist whose career in far-right politics long predates the formation of the alt-right (though he now classes himself as a “longstanding member” of the movement). He is best known as a proponent of “racial difference” and is seen as an intellectual within the white supremacist world.

Taylor was born and raised to missionary parents in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese as well as French. He earned a BA in Philosophy from Yale University in 1973 and then gained a master’s degree in International Economics from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris in 1978.

He was the West Coast editor of PC Magazine throughout the 1980s and in 1990 founded the New Century Foundation to push white supremacist pseudoscience. Taylor began publishing American Renaissance as a monthly print magazine in October 1990 and launched an accompanying website in 1994.

In January 2012 Taylor suspended publication of American Renaissance magazine, refocusing his efforts on the organisation’s website Amren.com, which has grown into an influential website within the far right.

Taylor began organising American Renaissance conferences in 1994 and there have been fourteen to date. These events have played an important role in bringing European far rightists and, importantly for the development of the alt-right, European New Right ideas across the Atlantic.

In 2008 Michael Walker, editor of the UK-based New Right magazine Scorpion, attended while, in 2006 and 2012, the prominent New Right and Archeofuturism theorist Guillaume Faye spoke.

Other Europeans to speak at the conferences include former British National Party leader Nick Griffin in 2002 and 2006, Adrian Davies in 2011 and 2014 and Matthew Tait in 2010 and 2015. Richard Spencer, now a leading alt-right figure, addressed the conference in 2013 and 2015.

Taylor is well known in far-right circles internationally and has made numerous appearances in Europe. In March 2012, he addressed a rally in Paris organised by the French Identitarian group, Bloc Identitaire, and, in July 2013, he addressed a meeting of the London Forum.

During the Trump campaign and accompanying heightened media attention on the alt-right, Taylor received unprecedented levels of recognition and exposure. This is due, in particular, to Taylor being featured prominently in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad released just before her now famous speech in Reno in which she denounced the alt-right.

On 9 September, Taylor spoke at a press conference held in Washington DC called “What is the Alt-Right?” alongside Richard Spencer of the NPI and VDARE’s Peter Brimelow, solidifying his place, in the eyes of the media at least, as one of the key players in the alt-right.

Andrew Auernheimer AKA weev

Notorious internet troll Auernheimer has become an increasingly important figure on the nazi website the Daily Stormer. Auernheimer provides technical assistance as the site has rapidly grown and has been key in ramping up the aggressive harassment campaigns carried out by users of the site.

Auernheimer, a member of online trolling collective Gay Nigger Association of America, achieved a level of internet-fame in the 2000s for trolling campaigns, for example in 2009 after he claimed responsibility for the reclassification of books on gay issues as pornography on Amazon. In 2011 he became involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Auernheimer was given a three-year jail term in March 2013 for computer fraud after lifting the personal data of 100,000 iPad users from AT&T’s website. After his conviction was overturned on a technicality in 2014, Auernheimer wrote a Daily Stormer post detailing his conversion too Nazism in prison, including a picture of him with a swastika tattoo adorning his chest. He has also detailed his adoption of the alt-right banner to as a means to a “global white supremacist empire”.

In March 2016, Auernheimer made headlines for manipulating printers in American universities to print virulently antisemitic, swastika-adorned pamphlets advertising the Daily Stormer. In August 2016, Auernheimer claimed he had targeted 50,000 printers to distribute another swastika-adorned flyer railing against “hordes of subhuman non-white animals in black, Muslim and Mexican form” and calling for white people to abandon “methods which are peaceful and do not scare anyone”.

Auernheimer also attempted to use the Daily Stormer forums to organise protests in London to support Julian Assange during the 2016 American Presidential campaign.

Theadore Beale AKA Vox Day

American blogger Beale runs the political commentary blog Vox Popoli and manosphere blog Alpha Game. Beale has flirted with alt-light positions but has embraced the ethno-nationalist alt-right.

Beale is a fantasy author, former computer game designer and former columnist for WorldNetDaily. In 2014, Beale founded Castalia House, a Finland-based publisher that has published works by Mike Cernovich and Tara McCarthy.

Beale claims to have popularised the term “cuckservative”, and he and his fans created “SJWList: The Complete List of SJWs”, a database of the broad Alternative Right’s perceived enemies, the so-called “Social Justice Warriors”.

Though describing himself as a “red nationalist” in reference to his Native American ancestry, he has also advocated ethnically cleansing minorities in order to reclaim “traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture”. He has also been vocal in his support of racist trolling.

Jeremy (“Jez”) Bedford-Turner

Turner is the figurehead of the Forum Network. His role as the leader of the cross-party Forum has made him a central player in the British far right with links to almost every active far right organisation in the UK, as well as many across Europe and North America.

Turner has a long personal history as an activist, standing for the National Front in a council by-election in Central Twickenham in 1992.

He later spent 12 years in the army during which time he learned the Afghani language Pashto and allegedly did translation work for military intelligence. His supposed links with military intelligence and his later promiscuousness in far right circles has, unsurprisingly, led to some suspicion among far right activists. Turner claims he was forced out of the military for attending a British People’s Party meeting in 2008.

He set up the London Forum in 2011 after a split with Troy Southgate and the London New Right. While the Forum Network hosts speakers from across the international far right, it has become a key speaking point for alt-right figures and has begun referring to itself as “a forum for Identitarian/Traditionalist/Alt-Right and other interesting speakers”.

Turner also founded the small monthly discussion group the Extremists Club together with the right-wing pagan David Parry.

Peter Brimelow

UK-born author Peter Brimelow is the founder of VDare.com, a racist anti-immigration website. While describing himself as a “paleoconservative”, Brimelow’s long-standing, radical racial anti-immigration views have made him a hero of the alt-right, describing himself as a “goduncle” of the movement.

After studying at the University of Sussex in the UK and Stanford University in the USA during the 1970s, Brimelow began work as a financial journalist in Canada and the USA, eventually becoming senior editor at Forbes magazine. He has also worked as a columnist with National Review.

Brimelow’s racial stances gained widespread attention with the publication of Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster in 1995, a book that, while forsaking an aggressive tone, contained strong currents of racism.

Brimelow founded the Center For American Unity in 1999, out of which emerged VDare.com, a “politically incorrect” website focussed on immigration from a racial and white nationalist standpoint. Brimelow’s twin brother, John, also writes for VDare, as does his wife, Lydia. The VDare Foundation came into being in 2007 to fund the website.

Brimelow has supported the burgeoning alt-right scene from its very earliest days, becoming a senior contributing editor of Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com on its founding in 2010. The VDare Foundation also sponsored the new website. Brimelow spoke at the American Renaissance conference in 2015 and 2016, as well as at the infamous NPI conference in 2016, giving a speech entitled “Trump’s America”, during which he praised Trump and Steve Bannon for fostering a coalition with a “white core” that’s “implicitly ethno-nationalist”.

Brimelow also spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2012, the largest annual gathering of American conservative activists, hosted by the American Conservative Union (ACU).

Nathan Damigo

Nathan Damigo is founder and former leader of Identity Evropa (IE).

An Iraq war veteran and convicted armed robber, Damigo is also a capable media performer and has managed to position himself as one of the alt-right’s most recognisable spokesmen.

Damigo enlisted in the Marine Corps aged 18 in 2004 and served two combat tours in Iraq. In 2007, Damigo was jailed for five years after putting a gun to the head of an Arabic cabdriver in California and robbing him of $43 dollars. While in prison, Damigo was “racialised” by the works of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Jared Taylor and Guillaume Faye.

After his release in 2014, he co-founded the shortlived National Youth Front (NYF), the youth wing of the American Freedom Party, alongside Angelo Gage.

Adopting the “Identitarian” label, Damigo founded IE in 2016, leading the clean-cut, suited, group to target university campuses and pushing white nationalist slogans on fliers, posters, stickers and graffiti.

Damigo has taken an active role in violent clashes with anti-fascist groups and was praised by the alt-right for viciously punching a female anti-fascist in the face at the April 2017 Berkley campus riot.

Damigo has penned articles for the NPI’s blog and for AltRight.com. He also publishes blogs through his own website and runs the On The Front podcast.

He is currently a social sciences student at California State University.

In August 2017, Damigo stepped down as leader of IE.

Francis Roger Devlin

Devlin is a white nationalist author and manosphere writer currently sitting on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Occidental Quarterly. Devlin has positioned himself as the “intellectual” of the manosphere and attempted to articulate more theoretical anti-feminist arguments steeped in evolutionary psychology.

His essay Sexual Utopia in Power, originally published in the Occidental Quarterly in 2006, has been influential in white nationalist and especially manosphere circles, and is the origin of several manosphere concepts and definitions. This essay was extended and published as a book through Counter-Currents Publishing in 2015.

Devlin’s work also dwells on supposed evolutionary differences between races and he has embraced the “alt-right” title, which he describes as “White advocacy”. Devlin has also written at length on French philosophers such as Alexandre Kojeve and reviewed the works of de Benoist.

He has spoken at the H.L. Mencken Club in 2011, the London Forum and New York Forum in 2016, at the Identitarian Ideas conference in 2016 and the NPI conference in 2016.

Pax Dickinson

Dickinson is the co-founder of WeSearchr and founder of Counter.Fund. Dickinson formerly worked as the Chief Technology Officer for Business Insider but was fired after a series of racist, antisemitic and sexist tweets. He runs the Pax Vobiscum blog which posts the slogans and articles of the alt-right. Dickinson was banned from Twitter in November 2016.

In 2015, Dickinson co-founded the crowd-funding site WeSearchr alongside Charles Johnson, leaving the outfit in 2017 and accusing Johnson of pocketing the site’s funds.

He subsequently started Counter.Fund which describes itself as “an ideological crowdfunding platform and self-governing political party” aimed at financially supporting activists of “the wider alt-right counter-culture”. Counter.Fund is open to both the alt-light and alt-right and Dickinson has spoken of attempting to cease conflict between the two distinct wings order to make the wider movement more functional.

Jack Donovan

Donovan is a prolific manosphere writer, author, and speaker on the alt-right circuit. Donovan also leads the Cascadia chapter (Oregon and Washington) of the masculinist tribe Wolves of Vinland (WoV).

Having embraced the gay lifestyle while studying art in New York in the 1990s, Donovan rejected the “gay" label (describing himself as an “androphile”) and began blogging about masculinity in 2007. Donovan’s work draws on evolutionary psychology to argue for a hierarchical tribal order he calls “The Brotherhood” that would exist in decentralised ethnic tribal “homelands”.

Donovan left Anton Lavay’s Church of Satan in 2009 and joined the neopagan WoV in 2014, a group that attracted controversy when a member was jailed for attempting to burn down a black church in Virginia.

Donovan was an early contributor to AlternativeRight.com, and has written multiple articles for the NPI’s Radix journal and the Counter-Currents Publishing website. He has also spoken at the American Renaissance conference in 2014 and the NPI conferences in 2014 and 2015, at the Northwest Forum in February 2017, and the 2017 winter conference of German New Right think tank, the Institut für Staatspolitik.

Donovan’s sexuality has made him a controversial figure in alt-right circles. In May 2017, he distanced himself from the label white nationalist although standing by his claim that he supports white nationalists.

Donovan also hosts the Start the World podcast that has featured a variety of far right and alt-right figures such as Austrian identitarian leaders, Martin Sellner and Martin Lichtmesz. Lichtmesz also translated Donovan’s book The Way of Men into German.

James Edwards

Edwards is a Tennessee-born host of The Political Cesspool (TPC), a white nationalist radio show, podcast and blog. Edwards also sits on the board of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), and is a director of the American Freedom Party.

Edwards first became active in politics when he volunteered for Pat Buchannan’s presidential campaign in 2000. In 2002, Edwards ran an unsuccessful campaign for State Representative in Bartlett, Tennessee. Edwards has also contributed to the antisemitic weekly newspaper, The American Free Press.

Edwards founded TPC in 2004, tailoring the show towards Christian, neo-Confederates and latching onto the alt-right with the ascendancy of Trump. Edwards has hosted a wide variety of far right and alt-right leaders on his show, leading the SPLC to say that he has “probably done more than any of his contemporaries on the American radical right to publicly promote nazis, Holocaust deniers, raging anti-Semitism and other extremists”.

Donald Trump Jr was booked to be interviewed by Edwards on TPC but, due to a scheduling conflict, Edwards instead questioned him on Sam Bushman’s “Liberty Roundtable”. Edwards was also able to acquire all-access media credentials for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, during which he interviewed a Trump campaign official alongside several Republican Congressmen.

Edward spoke at the 2012 and 2016 American Renaissance conferences.

Marcus Follin AKA The Golden One

Follin is a Swedish nationalist vlogger and bodybuilder who has gained prominence through his YouTube channel, The Golden One, created in 2013.

His videos primarily focus on personal training in order to prevent Western “degeneracy” and “beta male” status. While Follin tends to frame issues through the prism of race, he does not consider himself part of the alt-right as he doesn’t want “to be associated with people who don’t even lift”. He does, however, have a relatively large following within the alt-right.

Follin has written regularly for RightOn.net, the English language site of Swedish European New Right think-tank Motpol.

These articles are now posted to AltRight.com, with titles including “How Pepe the Frog will Save the Imperium”. Follin appeared on the alt-right media outlet Red Ice Radio and Tara McCarthy and Brittany Pettibone’s Virtue of the West podcast.

Follin also runs his own website, the goldenone.se, which posts articles, recommendations of European New Right books and advertises his clothing brand, Legio Gloria.

Follin was listed as a speaker at the October 2017 Erkenbrand conference alongside Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

Matthew Forney

Forney is an American manosphere blogger. Forney has adopted what he calls “white advocacy” and is one of the key figures helping to bridge the gap between the manosphere and the alt-right although, in June 2017, he attempted to dissociate himself from the movement.

He was raised in Syracuse, New York, and trained in English and journalism at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Albany.

Forney ran the online magazine Mala Fide from 2009 to 2012, compiling over 60 blog posts into a book entitled Three Years of Hate. Forney founded his website mattforney.com in April 2012 which has become his primary outlet for articles such as “The Case Against Female Self-Esteem” and “How To Beat Your Girlfriend or Wife and Get Away with It”. He also hosts an active YouTube page although his viewership remains small. Forney was also the editor at the now-defunct manosphere gaming blog Reaxxion.

Forney has also written for Taki’s Magazine, AltRight.com, Return of Kings, RightOn.net and The Right Stuff. He spoke at the Ideas IX conference in Stockholm, 25 February 2017.

Austin Gillespie AKA Augustus Invictus

Augustus Invictus is a far-right activist who has become increasingly prominent on the alt-right scene. Born Austin Mitchell Gillespie, he legally changed his name to Augustus Sol Invictus (Latin for “majestic unconquered sun”) in 2006. Invictus gained a J.D. at DePaul University College of Law in 2011.

In 2013 Invictus opened a criminal defence law firm Imperium P.A. Invictus has since “retired” from practicing law.

In 2016 Invictus ran for Senate in the Florida Libertarian Party primary, attracting press attention for his rhetoric (he has advocated a “Second American Civil War” to protect “Western civilisation”) and for sacrificing and drinking the blood of a goat in a pagan ceremony in 2013.

Invictus is founder of The Revolutionary Conservative, a right-wing news site, and is a Sergeant at Arms for the white supremacist Florida American Guard. At the June 2017 alt-right Free Speech Rally in Washington DC., Invictus claimed he does not consider himself part of the alt-right. He has, however, adopted an increasingly visible role at alt-right rallies.

According to alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, Invictus also wrote an early draft of the Alt-Right Manifesto, published on AltRight.com the day before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 12 August 2017, which culminated in the killing of antiracist protester Heather Heyer. Invictus was due to speak at the rally.

Invictus has positioned himself as a leading member of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK), the militant wing of Gavin McInnes’ alt-light fraternity Proud Boys, headed by Kyle Chapman (aka Based Stick Man).

Tim Gionet AKA Baked Alaska

Gionet, who also goes by the name Tim Treadstone, is an Alaska-born, California-residing, social media personality and activist.

Gionet first entered the far-right world after leaving a job as a social media strategist at Buzzfeed (where he claims they “were pushing […] anti-white, anti-male agendas”) to manage Milo Yiannopoulos’ “Dangerous Faggot” US college speaking tour before working with Mike Cernovich to run his MAGA3X grassroots, pro-Trump, “get out the vote” campaign.

Despite his active role in organising the June 19 DeploraBall inauguration party, Gionet was barred by Cernovich after a series of antisemitic tweets, although he later stated: “I don’t hate Jews, but there [sic] are something that I like to talk about”. Gionet, who helped promote many alt-right and pro-Trump messages on social media, is now due to publish a “political memoir” on the topic, Meme Magic Secrets Revealed.

While initially straddling the line between the alt-right and alt-light, Gionet has recently announced allegiance to the hard alt-right. He spoke at the June 2017 Free Speech Rally in Washington DC.

Paul Gottfried

Gottfried is a paleoconservative intellectual and President of the H.L. Mencken Club. Gottfried is credited for having coined the term “Alternative Right” and, while he has distanced himself from white nationalism, has been influential in the development of the wider Alternative Right.

Gottfried, of Jewish heritage, attended Yeshiva University before completing a doctorate at Yale under the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse. He eventually came to work as a Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, but is now retired.

Gottfried coined the term “paleoconservatism” in 1986, describing the role of the movement to raise issues such as “the desirability of political and social equality, the functionality of human-rights thinking, and the genetic basis of intelligence”. In 1992, Gottfried was an advisor for Pat Buchanan’s failed run for Republican presidential nomination.

In 2008, he founded the H.L. Mencken Club as “an organisation for independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right”. His speech at the very first meeting was published by Richard Spencer on Taki’s Magazine with the title “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right”, the first known usage of the term.

Spencer has spoken at the H.L. Mencken Club on multiple occasions and other speakers have included William H. Regnery II, Francis Roger Devlin, Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer and Taki Theodoracopulos.

In 2010, Gottfried took an editing role at Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. However Gottfried has rejected white nationalism as a “non-starter”, claiming that “what whites need to do is to stop beating themselves and treating other groups according to their just deserts”.

Gottfried has a regular column at VDare and has written articles for the blog of the National Policy Institute, Motpol’s website, Taki’s Magazine and the Unz Review. He has also written for American Renaissance. Gottfried spoke at the American Renaissance conference in 2008 and Identitarian Ideas conference in 2013.

Bradley Griffin AKA Hunter Wallace

Griffin is editor of the Southern Confederalist alt-right Occidental Dissent blog and writes for AltRight.com.

After enrolling at Auburn University in 2002, Griffin claims he turned towards white nationalism after reading Peter Brimelow of VDare and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. Griffin joined the Council of Conservative Citizens in 2010 and had a stint in the League of the South (LOS), leaving in 2015.

Griffin founded Occidental Dissent in 2008 and, through engaging in early discussions within the alt-right, has become a respected voice with a dedicated following. Griffin has proposed creating an “alt south” version of the alt-right and often also posts on the history of south/racial attitudes. He has been active in squabbles between the alt-right and alt-light.

Griffin was a key organiser of the first Atlanta Forum meeting in January 2017, drawing inspiration from Greg Johnson’s New York Forum.

Matthew Heimbach

Heimbach is a co-founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) and its political arm, the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP). Embracing white nationalism and now associating himself with the alt-right, Heimbach has multiple links to traditional American white supremacist and nazi movements.

Heimbach studied history at Towson University, Maryland, founding a White Student Union (WSU), which was addressed by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance in 2012.

Claiming that he was in part radicalised by the works of fascist theorist Julius Evola at university, Heimbach merged the WSU into the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) in 2013, to be co-led with his father-in-law, Matt Parrott. Parrott and Heimbach launched TWP in 2015.

Heimbach is chairman of the Nationalist Front, an umbrella group of racist groups, including hardcore nazi organisations. Heimbach has also developed connections to the nazi Czech Worker’s Party and Golden Dawn in Greece. Being barred entry to the UK, Heimbach filmed a video address to the Forum Network, alongside the network’s figurehead Jeremy Bedford-Turner, in the Czech Republic in September 2016.

In March 2016, Heimbach was caught shoving a black female protester at a Donald Trump rally in Kentucky, footage of which went viral.

Although he was disinvited from the 2015 NPI conference, since more vocally associating himself with the alt-right Heimbach has led TWP to “provide security” for alt-right leaders such as Richard Spencer at his Auburn University speech in April 2017.

Jason Reza Jorjani

Jorjani is the co-founder and former Culture Editor of AltRight Corporation, and former Editor-in-Chief of Arktos Media. Relatively unknown until recently, the New York-based academic has emerged as a key figure in the international alt-right due to his connections to Daniel Friberg and Richard Spencer.

After completing a BA and MA at New York University, Jorjani undertook a doctorate in Philosophy at the Stony Brook University in 2013, later developing his thesis into a book titled Prometheus and Atlas, published by Arktos in 2016. Jorjani is currently listed as a lecturer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Jorjani, who is of Iranian-American descent, describes himself as a “long-time student of the glorious history of the Aryan nation of Iran” and works closely with the Iranian Renaissance Movement (IRM), a small movement seeking to return to a pre-Islamist Iran and foster an alliance between “Iran’s future regime and nationalist movements in Europe and North America”.

Jorjani has described the IRM as “an Indo-European Identitarian metapolitical movement”. Jorjani spoke at the Identitarian Ideas conference in October 2016 and at the notorious NPI conference in November 2016, during which he claimed Arabic Muslims had committed “white genocide” against the “Caucasian civilisation” of Iran.

The conference received negative press around the world and Jorjani came under fierce criticism from academic circles and his former colleagues at Stony Brook reviewed the award of his doctorate. This provoked a furious response from Jorjani, who stated Spencer had become “a trusted friend” as a result.

At the Identitarian Ideas IX conference in February 2017, Jorjani announced the launch of AltRight Corporation, claiming it as his brainchild and boasting of the “instrumental role” he played in the merger. Jorjani also spoke at the London Forum in February 2017.

In August 2017 Jorjani left AltRight Corporation and Arktos Media to focus on a new movement, Iranian United Front.

Ruuben Kaalep

Kaalep is an Estonian politician and co-founder of the far-right Conservative People’s Party and its corresponding youth movement, Blue Awakening, established in 2012. He is an energetic organiser and an emerging figure in the international alt-right.

Kaalep describes himself as an “ethno-futurist”, drawing heavily on the writings of European New Right thinker Guillaume Faye. Kaalep advocates a “if you’re black – go back” policy in Estonia and champions paganism as an integral part of Estonian identity. Kaalep has also spoken of his hope for “white European ethnostates all across the western world”.

Kaalep was a key organiser in the inaugural EtnoFutur conference of “European Identitarians”, at which he spoke, as well as Blue Awakening’s torchlight march in Tallinn in February 2017 to mark Estonian independence day.

Kaalep has written for Counter-Currents Publishing and has spoken at The London Forum in 2015, American Renaissance conference in 2016 and the Identitarian Ideas IX gathering in Stockholm in 2017.

Jason Kessler

Kessler is a self-proclaimed “journalist, activist and author” and was one of the primary organisers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, 12 August 2017.

In 2016 Kessler has gained a level of press attention through his attempt to unseat Wes Bellamy, the sole black councilman in Charlottesville, who had called for the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Kessler was arrested in Charlottesville at the 14 May 2017 alt-right protest against the removal of Lee’s statue, which culminated in a torch-lit march.

Kessler organised the Unite the Right rally on 12 August in Charlottesville, which was set to feature Richard Spencer of the NPI and AltRight Corporation, Mike Peinovich (aka Mike Enoch) of The Right Stuff, alt-right troll Tim Gionet (aka Baked Alaska), Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers’ Party, Pax Dickinson of Counter.Fund and far-right activist Augustus Invictus. The event spiralled into violence and culminated in the murder of anti-racism protester Heather Hayer.

Kessler is President of Unity and Security for America, which describes itself as a “revolutionary right wing grassroots movement”. The group remains marginal. Kessler has also contributed to Peter Brimelow’s racist anti-immigration site VDare and alt-light troll Chuck C Johnson’s news site GotNews. Kessler had also written several articles for conservative news site The Daily Caller.

Alex Kurtagic

Alex Kurtagic is an important intellectual figure in the international alt-right. Spanish-born Kurtagic settled in the UK after undertaking an MA in Cultural Studies at the University of London. He founded the UK-based “underground extreme metal” label Supernal Music in 1996.

Kurtagic became a regular attendee of the London New Right and, in 2009, established the European New Right publishing group Wermod and Wermod (W&W), publishing Tomislav Sunić, Chilean nazi Miguel Serrano and Jonathan Bowden. In 2009, Kurtagic published his own novel, the dystopian racial screed Mister, which features Kevin MacDonald as a rebel academic imprisoned by a “liberal” regime.

At the 2011 NPI conference, Kurtagic gave his “Masters of the Universe” speech, which argues for waging a white nationalist cultural war against the left by using emotional, “irrational” appeals instead of facts and the heavy use of visuals. A transcription of this speech has been widely spread on early alt-right platforms.

Kurtagic has spoken at the NPI 2011 and 2013 conferences, the 2012 Identitarian Ideas conference and the 2012 American Renaissance conference. Inside the UK, Kurtagic has spoken at the 2013 Traditional Britain Group conference, and the London Forum 2013 and 2015.

Gregory Lauder-Frost

Lauder-Frost is the founder and Vice President of the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) and the UK head of Arktos Media.

Lauder-Frost was a member of the Conservative Monday Club, a pressure group later banned by the Tory party due to its views on race, from 1976 until 1992. During that time, he held the posts of Chairman of its Foreign Affairs Committee. He was also Vice-President of the anti-communist Western Goals Institute from 1989 until 2001.

Lauder-Frost was a member of UKIP for 11 years until 2013. He also appeared on the leaked membership list of the British National Party (BNP), although denies ever having been a part of it.

Lauder-Frost was imprisoned for two years in 1992 for stealing £110,000 from a London health authority while working as a payroll operations manager. He was also slammed in the press in 2013 after stating that anyone living in the UK and not of “European stock” should be offered “assisted voluntary repatriation” to his or her “natural” homeland.

Lauder-Frost founded the TBG in 2001 and has built the organisation into a key meeting point for the British far right and alt-right. Through his role as Head of Arktos UK, Lauder-Frost has turned the TBG into a UK stopover for European New Right and alt-right speakers, although his “High Tory” pretensions lead him to attempt to maintain a more “respectable” image than the Forum Network.

Colin Liddell

Liddell is the British editor-in-chief of alternative-right.blogspot.com (also known as alternativeright.com) and alt-rightnews.blogspot.com.

Alongside assistant editor Andy Nowicki, he took over alt-right site AlternativeRight.com from Richard Spencer, eventually re-establishing it as a blog in 2013. The importance of the blog has, however, dwindled since Spencer’s departure.

Liddell attracted some controversy in 2012 for publishing articles titled “Is black Genocide Right?’ and “Is White Genocide Right?” asking: “Does human civilization actually need the Black race?”, “Is Black genocide right?” and, if it is, “What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?” before declaring that “With starting points like this, wisdom is sure to flourish, enlightenment to dawn.”

Liddell has previously written for American Renaissance, The Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents Publishing and Taki’s Magazine. He also currently also writes for AltRight.com, the website of Spencer’s new outfit AltRight Corporation.

Lana Lokteff

Lana Lokteff, host of Radio 3Fourteen and co-host of Red Ice TV Live, is the most recognisable female figure active in the international alt-right. Lokteff, who claims her Russian ancestors fled to the USA after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, was raised by a New Age family in Oregon, USA and studied physics and philosophy at college. She left education to start a record label with her brother Joseph in 2003 after becoming “disappointed by the accepted curriculum”.

Lokteff joined Red Ice Creations, run by her husband Henrik Palmgren, in 2009. At this time, the outlet primarily hosted pseudo-scientists and conspiracy theorists like David Icke. As the alt-right scene has developed, however, both Palmgren and Lokteff have become open about their white nationalist stances and Red Ice has shifted into extreme rightwing territory.

In 2012, Lokteff established the bi-weekly show Radio 3Fourteen, so-named due to Lokteff’s birthday, 14 March. The show has found its niche in the alt-right with content aimed at a female audience and often hosts female alt-righters, such as Tara McCarthy, to discuss traditionalist lifestyles and femininity, alt-right dating advice and cooking tips, with fetching episode titles like “Modern women need to be lied to”.

Lokteff also owns the “organic non-toxic” clothing line Lana’s Llama, claiming synthetic fibres are at the root of a variety of health disorders including hormone disruption and muscle fatigue. She currently splits her time living between Oregon and Sweden.

Lokteff spoke at the Identitarian Ideas IX conference in Stockholm, February 2017.

Kevin MacDonald

Kevin MacDonald is an influential antisemitic academic and editor of webzine The Occidental Observer (TOO) and journal The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ). MacDonald has done more than any other figure currently active to codify antisemitism into pseudo-scientific theory and serves as something of an “elder statesman” to the alt-right.

MacDonald studied at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1960s and went on to earn a PhD in biology in 1981 from the University of Connecticut. MacDonald taught at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) from 1985 until 2014.

MacDonald was reportedly an anti-Vietnam war activist and has said that the number of Jewish activists in peace movements of the 1960s convinced him that Jews co-opt political and cultural movements in order to act on their hatred for Western ideals.

Throughout the 1990s MacDonald developed his theories in a trilogy of books, A People that Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998) and most infamously Culture of Critique (1998), positing that Judaism should be understand as a “group evolutionary strategy” that manipulates larger populations in order to gain disproportionate access to resources.

In 2000 MacDonald freely testified as an “expert witness” for British Holocaust-denier David Irving after he bought a libel trial against US academic Deborah Lipstadt. With his academic reputation in tatters, MacDonald began working with the Charles Martel Society (CMS), a white nationalist group funded by William H. Regnery II, in 2001.

MacDonald quickly established himself as a leading voice in its TOQ journal, eventually taking over as editor. In October 2009, he joined as director of the white nationalist American Freedom Party alongside Tomislav Sunić and James Edwards.

MacDonald started the online webzine TOO in 2007 that has since then become his primary platform and helped to introduce his theories to a wider, younger audience.

MacDonald, who has been associated with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, has used TOO to explicitly push for the adoption of antisemitism within the alt-right, linking the movement’s core concerns to “Jewish conspiracies”.

MacDonald also writes intermittently for VDare and his research is featured on the website of Richard Spencer’s NPI. MacDonald has spoken at the London Forum in 2015, at the USA Northwest Forum in 2016 and at the NPI conferences in 2015 and 2016. He gained press attention after he was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. in August 2016.

Tara McCarthy

McCarthy is a UK-born, USA residing alt-right media personality who previously hosted the Virtue of the West YouTube show alongside Brittany Pettibone. McCarthy continues to host her own podcast, The Reality Calls Show, as well as a vlog, This Week in the Alt-Right, with Mark Collett, previous chairman of the British National Party’s (BNP) youth wing as well as the BNP head of publicity until 2010. In his 2017 book, The Fall of Western Man, Collett describes the Holocaust as the ”alleged extermination of six million Jews” and declares that “when it comes to the notion of white guilt, nothing is pushed more strongly

Reality Calls is an explicitly alt-right programme that aims to “help make ethno-nationalist views more socially acceptable, and to educate people on the dangers of globalism and replacement migration from the third world”. She has hosted guests such as Nathan Damigo of Identity Evropa and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

While McCarthy embraces the alt-right title, her former Virtue of the West co-host Pettibone does not and so the show featured guest across the alt-light (including Lauren Southern, Mike Cernovich, Kyle Chapman and Jack Posobiec) and the alt-right (including Theodore Beale aka Vox Day and Lana Lokteff of Red Ice Creations).

Other far right guests include former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson). McCarthy is currently writing a book, “Irreplaceable: How and Why We Must Save the West”.

John Morgan

Michigan-born writer John Morgan is currently Book Editor of Counter-Currents Publishing and the former Editor-in-Chief of Arktos Media.

Morgan completed a BA in English at the University of Michigan in 1997 and, after a period of experimenting with psychedelic drugs, moved to Mumbai, India.

In 2006, Morgan joined Integral Tradition Publishing (ITP), a publisher distributing the works of Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Tomislav Sunić and Kevin MacDonald. Morgan went on to become Editor-in- Chief of ITP. During this time he began flirting with Hare Krishna religion.

ITP merged in Arktos Media at the end of 2009, which was based for the first few years in Goa, India, before moving to Budapest in 2014. Morgan worked as Arktos’ Editor-in-Chief until July 2016 when he left under a cloud of acrimony after Friberg accused Morgan and Greg Johnson from Counter-Currents of launching a coup attempt.

Morgan has since entered employment with Counter-Currents and the rivalry between Arktos/AltRight Corporation and Counter-Currents remains a major split within the alt-right.

Morgan spoke at the 2014 American Renaissance conference, at the Traditional Britain Conferences in 2014 and 2015, at the Identitarian Ideas conferences in 2013 and 2015 and at the New York Forum in May 2017.

Henrik Palmgren

Palmgren is Editor-in-Chief of Red Ice Creations and host of Red Ice Radio, and now Media Director for AltRight Corporation. Palmgren and his wife, Lana Lokteff, have steered Red Ice to become the premier alt-right media outlet on the web.

Palmgren, who describes himself as a “filmmaker, radio host, musician, editor, director, researcher and graphics designer”, founded Red Ice in 2003 as an art and graphic design website after studying media in Sweden.

Palmgren has stated that his entry points into conspiracy thinking were 9/11 conspiracies which he began to post on his website. After receiving heavy traffic, he launched Red Ice Radio in 2006 to host pseudo-scientists, UFOlogists, and conspiracy theorists.

Palmgren has stated he has long believed that “elites… have a beef with Europeans, they hate white people, they want to have us gone” and, as the alt-right developed, he and Lokteff have become open about their white nationalist stances. Since 2015, Palmgren has hosted extreme right, and especially alt-right, figures on Red Ice as a matter of course.

Through Red Ice, Palmgren is able to implement a production quality unparalleled in alt-right circles. Red Ice’s large audience has elevated Palmgren, who believes he is engaged in an “information war” against established media and governments, to one of the alt-right’s most recognisable and influential figures.

Palmgren spoke at the Identitarian Ideas IX conference in February 2017, at which Red Ice’s partnership with Richard Spencer’s NPI and Arktos Media was trumpeted. Palmgren now sits as Media Director of the new outfit, the AltRight Corporation, and also sits on the Board of Directors.

Matt Parrott

Parrott co-founded the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) in 2013 and its political arm, the Traditional Workers Party (TWP), alongside his son-in-law Matthew Heimbach.

In 2009, Parrott founded the Indiana-based racist group Hoosier Nation which became an official chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) in 2010 and then of the American Freedom Party in 2011 before folding in 2012.

Parrott also founded the online bookstore, Lighthouse Literature, which distributed the work of Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, Alex Kurtagic, James Edwards and Parrott himself.

Parrott hosts Radio Free Indiana, a weekly programme on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network.

Under Parrott TYN has drawn from the European Identitarian movements, writing in 2013 that “we must be the hipsters of White identity”. He has also claimed that he considers Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan as “ideological progenitors and fallen forefathers”.

A web designer by trade, Parrott frequently updates the TYN blog and has also written multiple articles for The Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents Publishing, and AlternativeRight.com.

Mike Peinovich

Peinovich is founder of influential alt-right hub The Right Stuff (TRS) and co-host of the Daily Shoah podcast. Through TRS, Peinovich has played a significant role in fostering the openly fascist currents in the alt-right as well as the creation of the online iconography and lexicon of the movement.

Peinovich founded TRS as a Facebook group for libertarians disillusioned with the “infiltration” of progressive values into the free-market right, turning it into a blog in 2012. From his desire to “trigger” liberals, Peinovich has stated that he came to embrace white nationalism and TRS became an extreme racist outlet.

In 2014 Peinovich founded the Daily Shoah podcast, from which the (((echo))) triple parentheses symbol used to identify Jews on the web emerged. In December 2016, Peinovich, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer and Richard Spencer of the NPI hosted a podcast in which they referred to themselves as “The First Triumvirate” of the alt-right.

Alongside James Edwards, Peinovich also sits on the board of the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, a Constitutionalist website now largely dormant.

In January 2017, Peinovich was exposed as a former tech worker with a Jewish wife. While this damaged his reputation among some antisemitic “purists”, alt-right figureheads such as Richard Spencer came out in his support. Peinovich has since become a more visible presence at meetings outside the internet.

In April 2017, Peinovich spoke at a rally led by Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party in Kentucky and attended Richard Spencer’s controversial talk at Auburn University, Alabama. He spoke at a May alt-right rally in Virginia and at the “Texas Belongs To Us” rally in Texas in June. Peinovich also spoke at the New York Forum and the Scandza Forum in 2017. He was also billed to headline the ultranationalist conference DingoCon in Sydney but the billing was cancelled due to fears he would be denied entry to Australia.

Paul Ramsey AKA RamZPaul

Ramsey is an American white nationalist blogger primarily known for his YouTube channel. Formerly a Republican, Ramsey was uninvolved in the far right before he began producing videos in 2009. He has since built a relatively large fan base.

While Ramsey often excludes outright racist epithets and tries to couch his content in humour, he has called for secession from the union and the establishment of a 90% white nation. He has also claimed “If I were the EU president I would appoint Breivik as head of the refugee commission. We need some creative solutions.”

In 2016, he attended the National Policy Institute “Identity Politics” conference and spoke on the rise of the alt-right, and at the American Renaissance Conference in 2014 and 2016. In 2017, he attended the EtnoFutur conference in Estonia that was organised by the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) and its youth wing “Blue Awakening” (Sinine Äratus) and the Identitarian Ideas IX in Stockholm, Sweden.

While he is regarded as an influential figure in the alt-right, Ramsey has distanced himself from the label and from Richard Spencer following the “Hailgate” scandal of the November 2016 NPI conference. Ramsey also has a long-running feud with Andrew Anglin.

William H. Regnery II

Regnery is the millionaire founder of the white nationalist think-tank, the National Policy Institute (NPI) and the racist group Charles Martel Society (CMS), best known for its journal The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ) and The Occidental Observer (TOO) webzine. He is the biggest known individual funder of the white nationalist alt-right.

The Regnery family made their fortune in the Chicago textile industry. Regnery’s grandfather, William H Regnery, was a founding member of the noninterventionist pre-WWII pressure group, the America First Committee and his uncle Henry founded Regnery Publishing, which has published a wide variety of conservative authors.

Regnery studied political science at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960s, but did not graduate. According to BuzzFeed, Regnery spent years struggling to run family businesses before fully embracing white nationalism during the 1990s.

Regnery founded the CMS in 2001, best known for its TOQ journal that has become an important pseudo-academic resource for the alt-right. Its webzine TOO, established in 2007, has become the primary platform of the virulently antisemitic academic Kevin MacDonald.

In 2005, Regnery founded the NPI in conjunction with Samuel Francis and Louis Andrews, focusing on publishing pseudo-academic reports on racial issues. In 2011, he hired Richard Spencer as NPI director. Spencer has led the NPI to become one of the central publishing and events organisations in the international alt-right.

While being publicity-shy, Regnery spoke at the 2013 meeting of Paul Gottfried’s H.L. Mencken Club and at the now notorious 2016 NPI conference. In 2014 Regnery was detained in Budapest after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán banned the NPI’s planned gathering in the city.

Regnery currently sits on the Board of AltRight Corporation, the new venture run by Spencer and merging the NPI, alt-right publisher Arktos Media, and alt-right media outlet Red Ice Creations.

Colin Robertson AKA Millennial Woes

Robertson is a white nationalist vlogger who rose to prominence making YouTube videos from his parents’ home in Linlithgow, Scotland. A former art student, he began posting gloomy monologues in January 2014 and has built a relatively large dedicated fan base serving as an important commentator on British issues and a kind of agony uncle for the alt-right.

Robertson hit the headlines after speaking at the “Hailgate” 2016 NPI conference in Washington DC. Newly notorious, after several years of operating anonymously, Robertson’s identity was revealed in the British press in January 2017, causing him to flee the UK.

Robertson subsequently spent time in Germany before travelling to Stockholm, where he spoke at the Identitarian Ideas IX conference in February and quoting the nazi “14 words”. Robertson is also known to have travelled to Rotterdam, Holland, where he spoke at the Erkenbrand meeting in September 2016, and Milan, Spain.

Robertson returned to the UK for the first time since his identity was exposed in May 2017, speaking at the London Forum and attending the Jonathan Bowden memorial dinner organised by the London Forum.

He also addressed the Scandza Forum in Oslo in July 2017. Other speaking engagements undertaken by Robertson include the inaugural meeting of the Northwest Forum in Seattle in November 2016.

Robertson is currently working on his own website and has in the past spoken of creating an online resource dubbed “The Debatrix” through which the alt-right can hone their arguments against liberals.

The exposure of his identity has greatly raised his profile and elevated him to one of the alt-right’s most recognisable faces.

Steve Sailer

Sailer is a prolific writer known for his pseudo-scientific writings on race that have become popular among the alt-right. Sailer graduated from Rice University in 1980 and began writing for National Review in the 1990s, a stint that ended when he was pushed out in 1998. He has since been confined to more fringe outlets, many of which are now associated with the alt-right, such as VDare, Taki’s Magazine, and the Unz Review.

Sailer is best known for coining the term “human biodiversity” (HBD) in the mid-90s, now an ideological mainstay of the alt-right, and much of his writing focuses on alleged IQ differences between “races”. Sailer has, however, rejected white nationalism for what he calls “citizenism”, the idea that a nation should overwhelmingly prioritise the interests of its current citizens over “foreigners”.

While Sailer has not embraced the term “alt-right”, he has written favourably of the movement in Taki’s Magazine, and figures, such as Ricky Vaughn, have described his writings as a gateway into white nationalism.

Sailer began claiming as early as 2000 that the route to success for the Republican Party was to take populist and hard-line nationalist and economic positions on immigration, white identity politics and economic protectionism in an appeal to working-class whites.

In the 2000s Sailer popularised the anti-interventionist and anti-immigration slogan “Invade the World, Invite the World”, which was used by Breitbart News Network in 2016 to attack Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Stead Steadman

Steadman, a London-based portrait painter, is a main organiser of the London Forum alongside Jeremy Bedford-Turner and Mick Brooks. Steadman is the primary networker for the Forum and regularly attends meetings across the UK far right spectrum – and abroad – to make contacts.

Steadman regularly attends the monthly Extremists Club meetings. Steadman is of the Asatru Norse Heathen faith, and attends monthly meetings (“moots”) in London. (He dresses up in a uniform reminiscent of Hitler’s Brownshirts or the South African nazi paramilitary Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging).

Because of Steadman’s networking he is well known in European New Right/alt-right circles, and his “black book” of international contacts allows the Forum Network – and the London Forum in particular – to be a hub for the discussion of far right and alt-right ideas.

Tomislav Sunic

A Croation author and former university lecturer, Sunić is a prominent European New Right intellectual and regular speaker in far-right circles.

Sunić studied in Zagreb before attaining a doctorate in political science in 1988 from the University of California, going on to teach at several American universities. Sunić claims to have worked in various diplomatic positions for the Croation government from 1993 to 2001, working in Zagreb, London, and Copenhagen.

Sunić has authored multiple books, including "Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right", the first book on the European New Right published in the English language through Arktos. He is also author of the antisemitic tract Homo Americanus which carries an introduction by Kevin MacDonald.

Sunić hosted The Sunić Journal on the white supremacist Voice of Reason Radio Network until 2012. Guests on the show include Richard Spencer, Kevin MacDonald, Greg Johnson, Francis Roger Devlin, Jack Donovan, Jonathan Bowden, Alex Kurtagic and Alain de Benoist.

Sunić has been published by American Renaissance and regularly writes for The Occidental Quarterly and The Occidental Observer. He also sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Occidental Quarterly and is a director of the American Freedom Party, alongside Kevin MacDonald and James Edwards.

Over his long fascist career, Sunić has spoken at the meetings of multiple far right groups, including the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and National Alliance, and in the UK meetings of the British National Party (BNP), National Front, and the London New RIght. Sunić has spoken at the London Forum in 2015 and 2017, and at the Traditional Britain Group in 2014.

Sunić spoke at the NPI conferences in 2011 and 2013 and at the Identitarian Ideas conference in 2011.

Matt Tait

Tait joined the British National Party (BNP) in 2004 aged 18 and founded his local branch soon after. Tait represented the BNP and failed miserably in several Parliamentary and local elections.

After leaving the BNP in 2010, Tait went on to found the Western Spring website with Larry Nunn (aka Max Musson) and also led Legion Martial Arts Club (Legion MAC), which organises camping events and martial arts training for the far right. Members of the now-proscribed nazi terror group National Action have attended Legion MAC camps.

Tait spoke at the American Renaissance conferences in 2010 and 2015 and also addressed the infamous November 2016 NPI conference. Tait is a well-known face on the UK far right scene and is also a regular at Traditional Britain Group (TBG) events.

Emphasising engagement away from the internet, Tait was the main organiser behind a number of alt-right socials that have taken place in Holborn, London in late 2016 and early 2017. In recent months, he has been quiet politically although he has spoken of setting up a YouTube channel to increase his online presence.

Daryush Valizadeh AKA Roosh V

Valizadeh is a pick-up artist, author and founder and editor of the popular manosphere blog Return of Kings (RoK) and personal blog RooshV.com. Valizadeh’s flirtations with the alt-right have helped introduce white nationalist ideas to the manosphere.

After studying as a microbiologist Valizadeh became popular in the manosphere for the “Bang” book series, begun in 2007, which details his “ruthlessly optimised process” for seducing women in various countries. In 2011 Valizadeh published Bang Iceland, in which he appears to admit to raping an intoxicated woman. Valizadeh founded RoK in 2012.

Valizadeh attended the 2015 NPI conference. He also invited Paul Ramsey (aka RamZPaul) to write a guest article on RoK and used the site to publish a positive review of the works of Kevin MacDonald, titled “The Damaging Effects of Jewish Intellectualism and Activism on Western Culture”.

Valizadeh won widespread notoriety for producing a 2015 article calling for the legalisation of rape on private property, since dismissed by him as “satire”. This article prompted many in the alt-right to reject Valizadeh, largely due to his Iranian origins. Valizadeh later lashed out at the alt-right and disavowed the movement, although he has since written in support of Andrew Anglin after the SPLC filed a lawsuit against him.

Ricky Vaughn

Ricky Vaughn is the pseudonym of an anonymous alt-right troll best known by the Twitter account @Ricky_Vaughn99. Vaughn, amassed over 60,000 Twitter followers by mixing incessant support of Donald Trump with attacks on establishment Republicans and white nationalist content.

In February 2016, Vaughn was ranked 107th on MIT Media Lab’s list of 150 election influencing Twitter accounts, beating out popular news platforms such as the Drudge Report and NBC News.

Vaughn, once a libertarian, described his journey to a belief in “racial separatism” in an interview with the NPI’s Radix journal in 2016, finding his way to the hardline alt-right through the Chateau Heartiste blog of James Weidmann and the works of Steve Sailer.

In October 2016, Vaughn’s Twitter account was suspended, and the #FreeRicky hashtag became the top trending topic on Twitter. Following his suspension, Richard Spencer of the NPI said Vaughn had become “indispensable”.

Vaughn has since built a large following on Gab.ai. A number of copycat Twitter accounts bearing the Ricky Vaughn pseudonym have sprung up.

James C Weidmann AKA Roissy In DC

Weidmann was one of the first manosphere writers to combine his pick-up artist advice with a core of open racism.

Weidmann blames feminism for the destruction of white civilization which, he believes, is being destroyed by “race-mongrelizing” (miscegenation) and low white birth rates.

Weidmann has called for the return of physiognomy (the ridiculous assessment of character by facial appearance) as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry and is author of a bizarre article titled “Hitler Was Beta” in which he claims that WWII and the Holocaust may not have occurred had Adolf Hitler read his blog.

Weidmann began associating himself with the alt-right in 2016 and has a small but dedicated following.

Tor Westman

Westman became acquainted with Daniel Friberg, CEO of Arktos, in 2007 after following the work of his Motpol project. Westman joined Arktos in 2014, taking over duties for the layout of books, managing the website and marketing for the outfit. Friberg has described Westman’s arrival at the outfit as the “most important breakthrough” in Arktos’ history.

Westman has been involved with AltRight Corporation since its launch and now and sits on the board of directors. Westman has also been involved in organising the Identitarian Ideas conferences.

Organisations

AltRight Corporation

Launched in January 2017, AltRight Corporation is the combined effort of Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, Daniel Friberg’s Arktos Media and Henrik Palmgren’s Red Ice Creations to create a new centre for the international alt-right.

The outfit, which operates out of an office in Washington DC, has Spencer as the American Editor, Friberg as the European Editor, Palmgren as the Media Director and, until August 2017, Jorjani as the Culture Editor. Tor Westman handles technical matters and William H. Regnery II is listed as “publisher” of the group.

The organisation aims to bring together “the best writers and analysts from Alt Right, in North America, Europe, and around the world” in order to create “a Breitbart for the age to come, not the one that has passed”. AltRight describes its message as “not a call to arms but a call to consciousness!”, attempting to “restore honor and our identity as a [white] people”.

The site posts news articles, longer opinion pieces on politics and culture and hosts a podcast. AltRight also produces the weekly hour-long Right On Radio podcast, which suffered a setback when its podcasts were deleted from Soundcloud in May 2017 due to violating the platform’s hate speech rules. The outfit also has an active YouTube page.

A sister site, Nordic.AltRight.com, is the first of what AltRight Corporation hopes will be several European sites under the same platform.

Jorjani announced the venture at the February 2017 Identitarian Ideas IX conference in Stockholm, but has since left the organisation. It is unsurprising, given those involved, that the output of AltRight leans on the highly theoretical and pretentious end of the alt-right.

Key individuals:

Richard Spencer

Daniel Friberg

Jason Reza Jorjani

Henrik Palmgren

Tor Westman

William H. Regnery II

AlternativeRight.com/Alternative-Right.blogpost.com

Founded in 2010, the Alternative Right blog is the self-professed “founding site of the alt-right” and currently the mouthpiece of editors Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki.

The blog has its roots in AlternativeRight.com, the website founded and edited by Richard Spencer in 2010. European New Right intellectual, Alex Kurtagic, had a stint as co-editor before Spencer shut down AlternativeRight.com in 2013 after joining the NPI and founding its Radix journal.

Liddell and Nowicki re-established Alternative Right as the blog that exists today although its importance to the movement has dwindled since Spencer’s departure.

The blog currently covers subjects such as “white sharia” and the Jewish Question, with other writers including James Lawrence and Keith Preston, and hosts Nowicki’s Nameless Podcast.

Key individuals:

Colin Liddell

American Renaissance

American Renaissance (AmRen) is the magazine, website and conference organised by the white supremacist “think-tank” New Century Foundation founded in 1990 by Jared Taylor. Taylor has stated that he founded AmRen “in order to awaken whites to the crisis they face and to encourage them to unite in defending their legitimate interests as a race”.

AmRen started as a monthly printed magazine promulgating “scientific” explanations for white superiority over blacks. In 1994, AmRen launched a website and began organising conferences that have become key meeting points for far right activists across the globe.

AmRen also publishes a regular podcast hosted by Taylor, runs an active YouTube channel and has published interviews with European New Right philosopher Alain de Benoist.

The organisation has held fifteen conferences to date that have played an important role in bringing in the European far right and, importantly for the development of the alt-right, European New Right ideas across the Atlantic.

In 2008, the editor of the UK-based European New Right magazine Michael Walker attended, while in 2006 and 2012 the prominent European New Right theorist and Archeofuturism theorist Guillaume Faye spoke.

Other Europeans to speak at the conferences include former British National Party leader Nick Griffin in 2002 and 2006 and Matthew Tait in 2010 and 2015. Richard Spencer addressed the conference in 2013 and 2015.

AmRen came to be associated with the alt-right early on, partnering with Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com in 2010. AmRen has become respected by the alt-right for its longevity and Taylor’s genial style. AmRen avoids much of the more extreme iconography and avoids crude racial epithets.

AmRen is also unusual for the alt-right for often avoiding outright antisemitism and has included Jews at events, although it has also provided a platform to extreme antisemites.

Key individuals:

Jared Taylor

Arktos Media

Launched in 2010 by CEO Daniel Friberg, Arktos Media has become the most important purveyor of European New Right and alt-right literature in the world. Arktos currently employs Friberg as CEO, Tor Westman as Marketing Chief and, until August 2017, Jason Reza Jorjani as Editor-in-Chief. Gregory Lauder-Frost of the Traditional Britain Group sits as the head of Arktos UK.

According to Friberg, the idea for Arktos originated from his European New Right think-tank Motpol, in late 2009, merging his Swedish Nordic Publishing house with the European New Right publisher Integral Tradition Publishing (ITP) steered by John Morgan. Despite being registered in the UK, for the first three years the main office was based in Goa, India, before relocating to Budapest, Hungary in 2014.

While Arktos claims not to “propagate any specific ideology, system of beliefs or viewpoint”, Jorjani has described Arktos publishing works based on “relevance to the Identitarian metapolitical struggle”.

The publisher acquired the rights for the central works of Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist early on and, in doing so, established itself as the go-to publisher of the European New Right. Arktos was the first to translate and publish books by de Benoist, Faye and Pierre Krebs in English as well as Dugin, Julius Evola, and seminal Identitarian works such as “Generation Identity” by Markus Willinger.

In 2016, Jorjani replaced former Editor-in-Chief John Morgan under a cloud of acrimony after Friberg accused Morgan and Greg Johnson from Counter-Currents of launching a coup attempt. Morgan has since joined Counter-Currents as book editor and the rivalry between Arktos/AltRight Corporation and Counter-Currents remains a major split within the alt-right. In August 2017, Jorjani himself announced that he was leaving Arktos. Arktos has published books in 14 different languages and plans to reach 180 unique titles before the end of 2017.

Key individuals:

Daniel Friberg

Jason Reza Jorjani

Tor Westman

Gregory Lauder-Frost

Atlanta Forum

The Altanta Forum is a small alt-right discussion group inspired by the Northwest and New York Forums organised by Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing which, in turn, were inspired by the UK Forum Network.

The inaugural meeting of the Atlanta Forum was held in January 2017, advertised as “A Southern Nationalist Conference of the Alt-Right”. Speaking at the event was Brad Griffin (aka Hunter Wallace) of the Occidental Dissent blog, Musonius Rufus of the alt-right Rebel Yell podcast (once a part of The Right Stuff podcast network), RG Miller, the chairman of the Arkansas League of the South, Michael Cushman of the “Southern Future” blog and far right attorney Sam Dickson.

During the event, a conference call was made with the New York Forum, which was taking place on the same day.

Key individuals:

Bradley Griffin AKA Hunter Wallace

Counter-Currents Publishing

Founded by Greg Johnson and Mike Polignano in 2010, Counter-Currents Publishing (CCP) is a webzine and publisher. CCP has described its aim as to “create an intellectual movement in North America that is analogous to the European New Right” and would “lay the intellectual groundwork for a white ethnostate in North America”.

Johnson sits as its Editor-in-Chief and John Morgan, former editor of Arktos Media, joined as the book editor in 2016. Polignano now works as its webzine editor.

CCP has published original works by Jonathan Bowden, Francis Roger Devlin, Andy Nowicki, James O’Meara and Johnson himself, and has distributed the works of de Benoist, Faye, Jack Donovan, Dugin and Evola. The CCP’s webzine has published articles by Benoist, Jonathan Bowden, Francis Roger Devlin, Donovan, Faye, Kevin MacDonald, and Sunić, as well as content from Oswald Spengler, Oswald Mosley, Evola, and British National Party (BNP) founder John Tyndall.

CCP’s podcast is hosted by Johnson and has featured sympathetic interviews with a variety of far right figures, including Benjamin Raymond of the UK-based nazi group National Action which is now an outlawed terrorist organisation. Other guests include Andrew Auernheimer (aka weev) of the Daily Stormer.

The fortunes of the CCP, which was an early partner to Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com, have been tied to the rise of the alt-right and have experienced a recent period of growth, with March 2017 being the website’s best month ever in terms of unique visitors (187,296). Great Britain provided the most visitors after America. Of the top ten cities visiting the site, five were based in Europe.

Inspired by the British Forum Network, CCP held the inaugural meeting of the bi-monthly New York Forum in May 2016. New York Forum events have included speakers such as Francis Roger Devlin and Mike Peinovich (aka Mike Enoch) of The Right Stuff. The Northwest Forum, based in Seattle and started in November 2016, also holds bi-monthly meetings, at which Kevin MacDonald and Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes) have spoken.

Since Morgan joined CCP, the organisation has been embroiled in a bitter feud with Arktos Media and AltRight Corporation, the leadership of which has accused Johnson and Morgan of attempting a “failed coup” of Arktos Media. The rift between AltRight Corporation and CCP remains a major fissure in the international alt-right movement.

Key individuals:

Greg Johnson

John Morgan

Daily Stormer

Founded in 2013 by Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer is the world’s most popular English-language nazi website. Alongside The Right Stuff, Daily Stormer has been key to fostering the hardcore, openly fascist, tendency within the alt-right, and is also notable for encouraging trolling campaigns.

Daily Stormer grew from Anglin’s first website Total Fascism. Named after the poisonous Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer, the website shuns pseudo-intellectualism and presents content as readable “news” articles, under which are thriving comment sections.

Startlingly extreme language is used on the site as a calculated tactic. According to Anglin statements such as “gas the kikes” are recognised as humour but “if repeated in media coverage, can work to desensitize the public to the Holocaust”.

Drawing inspiration from 4chan and 8chan, Daily Stormer makes heavy use of propaganda images. Those of Taylor Swift overlaid with Nazi quotes originating from the site have been widely shared away from traditional far right circles. Daily Stormer also hosts popular forums from which women are banned and aggregates alt-right podcasts and news items from across the net.

The site gained notoriety for its vocal support of Donald Trump. “Trump just keeps hitting all of our issues. Left and right. Is there anyone who could argue at this point he isn’t a reader of the Daily Stormer [?]” wrote Anglin in August 2016. The website has surged in popularity following Trump’s election and has claimed to be “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right website”.

Daily Stormer’s influence has spread beyond the internet due to the trolling and harassment campaigns orchestrated by Anglin. Examples include “Operation: Kikebart”, during which Anglin’s “Troll Army” flooded the comment sections of Breitbart News Network with nazi propaganda after it launched its Jerusalem office, the harassment of Alex Jones of InfoWars for having a Jewish wife and the antisemitic harassment of British Labour MP Luciana Berger. In March 2016, site administrator Andrew Auernheimer (aka weev) manipulated printers in American universities to print virulently antisemitic, swastika-adorned pamphlets advertising the website.

In April 2017, the SPLC filed suit in a federal court against Anglin after his “Troll Army” carried out a torrent of antisemitic abuse and threats directed towards a Jewish woman. Anglin has since crowdfunded almost $160,000 to fund his defence.

The Daily Stormer forums have been used to organise meetings (so-called “book clubs”) in the US and the UK, and members of the UK nazi group National Action used the forums to recruit before being banned as a terror group in December 2016. Auernheimer has also attempted to use the forums to organise protests in London in support of Julian Assange.

The Stormer’s approach is criticised by the more pretentious ends of the alt-right as lowbrow although it has also been lauded by many for its perceived success and influence.

Key individuals:

Andrew Anglin

Andrew Auernheimer AKA weev

Erkenbrand

Erkenbrand is an initiative, started in 2016, that organises regular alt-right meetings and conferences in the Netherlands. Speakers at its events have included the UK vlogger Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes) and the American white nationalist and manosphere author Francis Roger Devlin.

Speakers for the October 2017 event “Towards a New Golden Age” include the Swedish alt-right figure Marcus Follin (aka The Golden One) and Jared Taylor from American Renaissance.

Key individuals:

Bart

Michael

Etnofutur

EtnoFutur held its inaugural conference on 24 February 2017, describing itself as a “conference of European Identitarians”. The event was organised by Ruuben Kaalep of Estonian far right youth group Blue Awakening, and was held in commemoration of Estonian Independence Day.

Kaalep spoke at the event on his “ethno-futurist” philosophy, which draws heavily on the writings of European New Right thinker Guillaume Faye. Other speakers at the event included American white nationalist vlogger Paul Ramsey (aka RamZPaul), Daniel Kaartinen, Chairman of the Finns Party Youth of South Eastern district and Vlad Kovalchuk of the Ukrainian party National Corps.

Key individuals:

Ruuben Kaalep

The Forum Network

The Forum Network is a collection of far right discussion groups that includes the London Forum and regional branches in Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales, and the South West.

The network has become the prime-meeting point for the theory-oriented elements in the British far right, and has begun describing itself as “a forum for Identitarian/Traditionalist/Alt-Right and other interesting speakers”. Meetings of the London Forum regularly exceed 100 attendees.

The network began in 2011 when long time British fascist Jeremy Bedford-Turner split from the London New Right group headed by Troy Southgate. Turner remains the figurehead of the network with key organising duties undertaken by Stead Steadman and Mick Brooks. Larry Nunn (aka Max Musson) is a key funder of the Forum Network.

The Forum Network has a degree of ideological fluidity and has had speakers from across the British and international far right. Because of this, it has links to almost every active far right organisation in the UK and many across Europe and North America.

The Forum has inspired copycat groups like the New York Forum and Northwest Forum, founded in 2016 by Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing. Johnson’s Forum in turn inspired the Atlanta Forum, the first meeting of which was held in January 2017, organised by Bradley Griffin (aka Hunter Wallace) of the Occidental Dissent blog.

Key individuals:

Jeremy (“Jez”) Bedford-Turner

Stead Steadman

Mick Brooks

Identity Evropa

Identity Evropa (IE) is a white nationalist college fraternity founded in March 2016 by Nathan Damigo. IE aims to present a clean-cut face for the alt-right and describes itself as “a North American based Identitarian organisation”.

The group emerged from the short-lived National Youth Front, the youth wing of the American Freedom Party of which Damigo was vice-chair. IE draws inspiration from the European Identitarian movement aesthetically and focuses heavily on branding. Damigo has also cited the tactics of National Action, a UK-based neo-Nazi organisation that has since been banned as a terror group, as an inspiration for IE.

IE has targeted college campuses and attempted to make inroads into college Republican societies. Damigo told the Daily Beast that IE intends to “attract high-quality individuals from doctors to lawyers to economists” in order to “act as a fifth column, over time shifting the edifice of our political establishment to encompass our interests”. Candidates, who can apply through an interview process, are disqualified if either they or their partner are of non-European or “Semitic” heritage.

IE is active offline, promulgating white nationalist slogans on fliers, posters and graffiti around universities. In February 2017, it gatecrashed Hollywood actor Shia Labeouf’s art installation, with IE member William Clark displaying a visible Nazi tattoo. The group is responsible for popularising the “You will not replace us” slogan.

IE co-sponsored the torchlight protest against the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, VA in May 2017. Members of IE have also played an active role in the violent confrontations with anti-fascist groups, Damigo gaining notoriety after he was filmed punching a female anti-fascist in the face at the April 2017 Berkley campus riots.

Damigo claimed in May 2017 that since Trump’s inauguration IE had grown from 12 people to more than 450 members across dozens of campuses although there appears to still only be a small, tightly knit group of dedicated activists.

In August 2017, Nathan Damigo stepped down as leader and was replaced by Eli Mosley.

Key individuals:

Nathan Damigo

Eli Mosley

LD50

Located in Hackney, East London, LD50 is an art gallery associated with the alt-right and run by Lucia Diego.

The gallery opened in October 2014 and hosted exhibitions from well-known artists before Diego took ownership of the gallery in 2015. The gallery attained notoriety for an exhibition which ran from November 2016 – January 2017 dedicated to alt-right iconography.

Stead Steadman of the Forum Network established contact with Diego who has since attended London Forum meetings.

LD50 has also hosted talks from Peter Brimelow of VDare and influential neo-reactionary thinker Nick Land and has used speeches (delivered by “virtual avatars”) from the editor of the alt-right blog Amerika.org Brett Stevens and manosphere writer Mark Citadel of the Return of Kings blog.

Key individuals:

Lucia Diego

London Socials

Since October 2016, a number of informal alt-right gatherings have taken place in London.

Former British National Party organiser Matt Tait held the first alt-right social in October 2016 in Holborn, London, which attracted over 20 attendees, including Stead Steadman of the Forum Network. Subsequent events were held for Trump’s election victory in November and his inauguration in January 2017. These events, however, have largely petered out.

Several separate monthly gatherings have been organised by Christopher Ram. Ram also runs the Facebook group “Alt Right/Right Wing London Discussion meetup group” where the events are advertised.

Key individuals:

Matt Tait

Christopher Ram

Motpol

Motpol is a Swedish Identitarian and European New Right think-tank that, through the influence of founder and Editor-in Chief Daniel Friberg, has played an important role in laying the foundations of the international alt-right. Motpol has described its aim as being to redefine “the premises of public discourse” in Sweden and in Europe as a whole.

Joakim Andersen sits as Deputy Editor, and writers for the website include Marcus Follin (aka The Golden One) and “godfather of the alt-right” Paul Gottfried. Friberg has claimed that the idea for Arktos Media originated from a 2009 Motpol meeting.

Motpol organises the annual Identitarian Ideas conferences, the first taking place in 2010. These conferences have become important gathering points for the international alt-right and European New Right. Speakers at Identitarian Ideas have included Faye, Dugin, Gottfried, Sunić, Devlin, Kurtagic, Willinger and John Morgan.

The Identitarian Ideas IX conference in Stockholm in February 2017 was one of the largest alt-right gatherings to date, with over 300 attendees. It was at this meeting that Jason Reza Jorjani announced the launch of AltRight Corporation, the new venture of Richard Spencer’s NPI, Friberg’s Arktos media and Red Ice Creations. Palmgren, Lokteff, RamZPaul, Ruuben Kaalep, Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes), and Matt Forney also spoke.

In October 2015 Motpol launched an English language sister site, RightOn.net. However the site now redirects to AltRight.com, the website of AltRight Corporation.

Key individuals:

Daniel Friberg

National Policy Institute

The National Policy Institute (NPI) is a white nationalist think tank, formed in Augusta, Georgia, in 2005 by the far right publisher William H. Regnery II in conjunction with Samuel T. Francis and Louis R. Andrews. The organisation was launched with the avowed intention to “elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights”.

In 2011, Richard Spencer took the reins of the NPI upon the death of the incumbent leader, Louis Andrews. Spencer promptly moved the operation from Washington DC to Whitefish, Montana.

The organisation has been important for bringing European activists and thinkers to an American audience via its national conferences, the first taking place in 2011. A good example of this was their 2013 “After the Fall’” conference that included European New Right speakers, including de Benoist, Sunić and Alex Kurtagic.

However the NPI’s scheduled 2014 conference in Budapest ended in failure when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced he would use “all legal means at his disposal” to prevent the meeting, leading to Spencer’s arrest and subsequent three-year ban from all 26 European nations covered by the Schengen agreements.

The NPI grabbed headlines around the world in late 2016 when Spencer was filmed bellowing “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” at its Become Who You Are conference in Washington DC, accompanied by attendees making fascist salutes. Speakers at the event included Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald and Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes) from the UK.

In early 2017, the NPI partnered with Red Ice Creations and Arktos Media to form AltRight Corporation. The NPI has played a pivotal role in providing intellectual veneer to white nationalism and fostering the pretentious, pseudo-academic currents within the alt-right and in providing key white nationalist networking events for activists from around the globe.

Key individuals:

Richard Spencer

William H. Regnery II

Nordiska Alternativhogern (The Nordic Alternative Right)

This group is the Scandinavian branch of AltRight Corporation. It was launched in May 2017 and its Chairman is former Sweden Democrat Christoffer Dulny. Its Vice Chairman is Daniel Friberg and its Strategic Advisor is Richard Spencer.

Occidental Dissent

Founded in 2008, Griffin has also used the site to chronicle and analyse the development of the alt-right in detail and has taken an active role in infighting between the movement’s various factions.

OD combines dewy-eyed nostalgia for the Confederacy and Jim Crow with white nationalism. For example, it includes a timeline of America’s “racial history”, dating back to the 1550s.

Other writers include Michael Cushman, Silas Reynolds and Marcus Cicero, but it is Griffin’s writing that has earned OD a loyal following.

Key individuals:

Bradley Griffin AKA Hunter Wallace

The Occidental Quarterly/The Occidental Observer

Founded as the journal of William Regnery II’s Charles Martel Society (CMS) in 2001, The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ) and its sister webzine, The Occidental Observer (TOO), are the primary outlets of Kevin MacDonald and the central source for antisemitic pseudo-science on the alt-right.

TOQ, which imitates the style of academic journals, aims to “unapologetically” defend “the cultural, ethnic and racial interests of Western European peoples”. MacDonald sits as Editor and the Editorial Advisory Board includes Francis Roger Devlin, Michael O’Meara and Tomislav Sunić. The organisation’s 2006 tax return listed Jared Taylor of American Renaissance as a board member.

TOO was founded in 2007 by MacDonald and publishes shorter “news” articles and op-eds, eschewing longer articles but keeping a faux-academic approach. TOO, which describes itself as “touching on the themes of white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West”, has an obsessive, overriding fixation with Jews, the likely result of MacDonald’s unfiltered influence.

Embracing association with the alt-right, MacDonald and TOO have explicitly pushed forward the movement’s adoption of more hard-line anti-Jewish stances by linking core alt-right issues, such as supposed racial reconstruction of the West and globalism, to “Jewish conspiracies”.

Other contributors to TOO include Richard Spencer, Devlin, Sunić, Colin Liddell, Matt Parrott, alongside former National Front leader Martin Webster and Nick Griffin. The site also includes multiple interviews from de Benoist, translated into English by Sunić.

Key individuals:

Kevin MacDonald

William H. Regnery II

The Political Cesspool

The Political Cesspool (TPC) is a Tennessee-based neo-Confederate, white nationalist radio show, podcast and blog founded in 2004 by James Edwards, which has embraced the “alt-right” label with the ascendancy of Trump. The SPLC has said that through the show Edwards has “probably done more than any of his contemporaries on the American radical right to publicly promote neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, raging anti-Semites and other extremists”.

The site hosts articles and a three-hour weekly show, hosted by Edwards and Keith Alexander. The show is also available offline through Liberty News Radio Network and Accent Radio Network. Among the sponsors of TPC are The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ) and the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

The show claims to hold a “pro-White”, anti-gay Christian philosophy that seeks to “revive the white birth rate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races”.

TPC gained some notoriety in the press when Donald Trump Jr was booked to be interviewed on the show although, due to a scheduling conflict, Edwards instead questioned him on Sam Bushman’s “Liberty Roundtable”.

Red Ice Creations

Founded by Henrik Palmgren in 2003, Red Ice Creations is the premier media network of the alt-right. With its two radio shows, live TV broadcasts and news coverage, Red Ice implements a production quality that far surpasses other alt-right media. The site claims it reaches “hundreds of thousands” of people on a monthly basis.

Palmgren initially started Red Ice as a graphic design website but began receiving heavy traffic after posting 9/11 conspiracy theories to his website. Palmgren launched Red Ice Radio in 2006 initially to host pseudo-scientists, conspiracy theorists and marginal subcultures. Palmgren’s wife, Lana Lokteff, founded Radio 3Fourteen in 2012 under the Red Ice umbrella.

Red Ice has since shifted into more extreme rightwing territory. By 2014, the site was hosting the likes of Kevin MacDonald and, by 2015, open nazis like Andrew Anglin as a matter of course. Red Ice Radio serves as the primary platform with Radio 3Fourteen aimed at more women in the Alternative Right, hosting guests such as Brittany Pettibone and Tara McCarthy.

Palmgren has said that media companies like his own are in an “information war” and a “war of ideas” against established media and governments. Mirroring far right movements in Sweden, the outlet has adopted a virulently anti-Muslim stance, hosting “counter-jihad” movement figures such as Ingrid Carlqvist and UKIP politician Anne Marie Waters.

Other Red Ice staffers include Reinhard Wolff, who writes articles, uploads shows and occasionally fills in presenting and commentary roles, and Fredrik Tormann, the audio engineer and mixer of the outfit.

Red Ice now live streams alt-right conferences, such as the 2016 American Renaissance and the 2017 Identitarian Ideas IX conference in Stockholm. Red Ice partnered with Richard Spencer’s NPI and Arktos Media to form AltRight Corporation in early 2017 and Palmgren is now Media Director and sits on the board of directors.

In the wake of Charlottesville, Red Ice suffered a heavy blow when its membership database was stolen by hackers.

Key individuals:

Henrik Palmgren

Lana Lokteff

The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff (TRS) is a central alt-right website hosting articles, forums and popular podcasts including The Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation. TRS has been instrumental in the creation of a distinctive lexicon and iconography for the online far right and, in tandem with the Daily Stormer, in fostering the explicitly fascist currents and troll culture within the alt-right.

Mike Peinovich (aka Mike Enoch) started TRS as a Facebook group for libertarians disillusioned with the “infiltration” of progressive politics into the free-market right, before founding the TRS blog in 2012 with the intention of provoking liberals.

According to Peinovich, from this opposition to liberalism “we actually developed some kind of coherent worldview” over the next two years with a core principle of white nationalism.

TRS grew exponentially after podcast The Daily Shoah was established in August 2014. The Fash the Nation (FoN) podcast was founded in August 2015 to cover Trump’s presidential campaign, becoming the most popular “conservative” podcast on Soundcloud before it was banned in October 2016.

TRS routinely uses gutter racist and misogynistic slurs, and is the origin of the (((echo))) triple parentheses symbol used to identify Jews on the web. TRS also posts extreme content (see the 2016 article Genocide: The Inescapable Conclusion), sometimes masked with an ironic tone.

The site was shaken in early 2017 after the identities of several key TRS figures were outed by anti-fascists and the 8chan forum, including Daily Shoah “Death Panel” members Ghoul (Cooper Ward), Bulbasaur (Van Robert Bryant) and Seventh Son (Jesse Dunston).

Soon afterwards, Peinovich was exposed on the news site Medium as a NYC-based web developer with a Jewish wife. TRS took down its password-protected forums, FoN took a prolonged hiatus and the Southern Confederalist podcast Rebel Yell broke from the site.

Alt-right figureheads such as Richard Spencer came out in support of Peinovich who has remained at the forefront of the alt-right and TRS’s forums have since reopened and FoN returned to regular shows. TRS remains a fertile recruiting ground for the alt-right.

Key individuals:

Mike Peinovich

Scandza Forum

The Swedish based alt-right forum was launched by Frodi Midjord, in Stockholm on 20 May 2017. Speakers at the inaugural event included leading American figures Greg Johnson and Kevin MacDonald and editor of Radix Journal Andrew Joyce.

The Forum’s second event was held in July 2017 in Oslo, Norway, and included the UK alt-right vlogger Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes) and Mike Peinovich (aka Mike Enoch) from The Right Stuff.

Key individuals:

Frodi Midjord

Taki's Magazine

Taki’s Magazine (shortened to Takimag) is a news and opinion webzine founded by Greek paleoconservative writer Taki Theodoracopulos in 2007. With Theodoracopulos’ daughter, Mandolyna, as current editor the site remains popular among the broad Alternative Right for its array of writers and use of humour.

Due to Richard Spencer’s stint as editor between 2008 and 2010 the site was crucial in popularising the term “Alternative Right” as used to encompass various anti-establishment right-wing currents, such as paleoconservatism, right-libertarianism and white nationalism. The comment sections beneath articles became popular debating platforms for these currents.

The site attracted controversy in the mainstream press in 2012 after far right activist John Derbyshire wrote a piece urging whites and Asian parents to avoid contact with black Americans and after Theodoracopulos wrote an article appearing to endorse the Greek nazi party Golden Dawn.

While Taki’s Magazine states that it rejects political labels, the site has produced white nationalist-friendly content. Writers have included Patrick Buchanan and Gavin McIness alongside a gamut of alt-right figures such as Colin Liddell, Andy Nowicki, Richard Spencer, Steve Sailer, Jim Goad, Jared Taylor, Paul Gottfried, Paul Ramsey (aka RamZPaul), and Matt Forney.

Key individuals:

Taki Theodoracopulos

Traditional Britain Group

Founded by Gregory Lauder-Frost in 2001, the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) is a London-based organisation that hosts far right gatherings, dinners and conferences. President of TBG is 78-year-old Merlin Hanbury-Tracy (7th Baron Sudley) with Lauder-Frost and John Kersey sitting as Vice-Presidents.

While the TBG hosts speakers from across the international far right, alongside the Forum Network it is a central networking and meeting point for the dissemination of far right and European New Right ideas in the UK. This is in part due to Lauder-Frost’s role as the UK head of Arktos Media. Speakers have included Richard Spencer, Kurtagic, Sunic, John Morgan and Markus Willinger of Generation Identity, as well as UKIP MEP Gerard Batten and Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg (who later apologised for his appearance). This enables TBG to be attended by Conservative Party and UKIP members as well as more extreme elements. Several Breitbart London writers are known to have attended and UK-based alt-right organiser Matt Tait is a regular attendee.

Key individuals:

Gregory Lauder-Frost

Traditionalist Youth Network/Traditionalist Workers Party

The Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) is a white nationalist group founded in 2013 by Matthew Heimbach and Matt Parrott. The Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) is the political arm of TYN, founded in 2015. The group claims membership of the alt-right, but represents the more thuggish elements active offline.

TWP has drawn inspiration from the European Identitarian movements and has described itself as having an “identitarian and traditionalist vision”, using the slogan “local solutions to the globalist problems”. TWP has also adopted some radically conservative Christian elements, is deeply antisemitic and has associated closely with traditional American white supremacist and nazi groups

TWP fielded its first candidates in Autumn 2015, and while openly running under a TWP banner at federal level, The Huffington Post has reported that Heimbach and Parrott intend to run sleeper agents masquerading as Republicans on the state level. In November 2016, TWP claimed to have 16 chapters around the US with around 500 dues-paying members.

In June 2016, a TWP protest, held in conjunction with racist skinhead group Golden State Skinheads, turned into a mass brawl with anti-fascist protesters, with seven people – mostly anti-fascists – stabbed, two with life threatening injuries. Heimbach has since led TWP to “provide security” for events at which altright leaders speak, such as Richard Spencer’s Auburn University speech in April 2017.

Key individuals:

Matthew Heimbach

Matt Parrott

VDare

VDare is a racist anti-immigrant news and discussion website founded in 1999 by author Peter Brimelow. Richard Spencer has described VDare as “the premier website on discussing immigration and the national question and doing it from an alt-right perspective, as well as some other perspectives”.

Named after Virginia Dare, the first known English child born in the Americas, VDare emerged from Brimelow’s Center For American Unity and was initially intended to expand on his 1995 bestselling immigration book Alien Nation.

The VDare Foundation – which describes itself as “a non-profit that warns against the polluting of America by non-whites, Catholics and Spanish-speaking immigrants” – was set up in 2007 to fund the website. The VDare Foundation also sponsored Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com in 2010.

VDare posts both opinion articles and race “science” pieces and also produces Radio Derb, a weekly radio show hosted by far right writer John Derbyshire. Other staffers include Brimelow’s wife Lydia, James Fulford and James Kirkpatrick.

While describing its writers as “a coalition agreed only on the need for immigration reduction”, racial matters are at the forefront of the website. Though more mainstream figures like Patrick Buchanan and Ann Coulter have written for VDare, extreme figures such as Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald and Francis Roger Devlin have a multitude of articles available on the site, ensuring its popularity among the alt-right.

A tweet from the website was featured on a screen at the 2016 Republican National Convention during the roll call vote for Trump’s presidential nomination.

Key individuals:

Peter Brimelow

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